tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-82423185215393778652024-02-19T21:12:22.512-05:00Skunked Again"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation." —PlatoJoe Golahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07660986477477676629noreply@blogger.comBlogger20125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8242318521539377865.post-47416584113988385482009-08-18T12:30:00.000-04:002009-08-18T12:30:00.535-04:00Zero Unplayed, and A Good Week's GamingEarlier in the year I had mentioned my obsession with getting my "unplayed" list down to zero games—that is, to be able to say that I've played all the games in my collection—but I forgot to memorialize the reaching of this lofty goal here on the 'blog; I played <i>Die Sieben Weisen</i> with the Wilton gaming group on June 30th and I played <i>Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde</i> with Keith Corbino, David Molnar and David Molnar's daughter at Alternate Boardgames in Milford on July 11th. These games had been stubbornly sitting on the shelf since October 2006 and November 2003, respectively.<br /><br />The question now is how many of the games in my collection have I only played once? Well, that would be about twenty, but let's not dwell on that. Yes, I think that would be for the best.<br /><br />Because of one thing and another I was able to go out gaming three nights last week, and I ended up playing a lot of great stuff with a lot of great people. Tuesday I played my favorite game, <i>Taj Mahal</i>, with Matt, his wife Andrea, and their friends Josh and Donna. I should really up write something about this game here on the blog sometime, but I can give a short description for those who have never played before. At its heart it's a card game; there are cards which show one or two of the six different symbols, and on his turn a player must either play one or two cards or else drop out of the round. When the player drops out he will check to see if he has played more of any of the various symbols than any of the other players who are still in the round; if so, he will take the reward associated with that symbol. During a round a player may play as many cards as he wishes, but he will only be able to draw one or two new cards at the end of the round (three if he stays out entirely), so it is important to pick one's battles very carefully.<br /><br />Where the game gets interesting are the rewards themselves, for they allow for a lot of strategic thought. For example, five of the six symbols will allow a player to put a palace down on the map, and if the player is able to create a chain of palaces across the board this will add up to a large number of points. There are also special cards that a player can win which will give them an advantage during the card play.<br /><br />Taken all together <i>Taj Mahal</i> has an excellent mix of tense, in-your-face brinkmanship-type card play with a lot of scope for formulating and executing long-term strategies. A good <i>Taj Mahal</i> player must be able to look far ahead and make plans for future rounds, but he must also be able to keep a cool head during the card play and know when to back away from a fight.<br /><br />I guess my skills were a little rusty on Tuesday night, because Matt killed us, with me and Donna tied for a distant second place (though if I had given a little more thought to the final round I probably could have squeaked past her). Regardless, it was a good time, and even casual-gamer Andrea really enjoyed herself.<br /><br />Saturday Night was Sausage Festival II: Electric Boogaloo at my friend Eric's, also attended by game fanatic Mark Casiglio. We had bratwurst, knackwurst and weisswurst from Karl Ehmer. The winner: bratwurst! I vote that the next sausage festival be a bratwurst festival. Or maybe brats 'n' kielbasa? On a side note, it warms my heart that there is a Wikipedia page devoted to the sausage races at Miller Park, including the current standings (hot dog 17, Italian sausage 13, bratwurst 10, chorizo 9, kielbasa 6).<br /><br />After eating lots of sauerkraut and pitching back a beer or two, we were ready to get down to business. First on the table was <span style="font-style: italic;">The Scrambled States of America</span>, a cute little game won by Eric's daughter. Way to go, Simone! Afterwards we sunk our teeth into a game Mark brought, <i>Stone Age</i>. which among other things features a "birthing hut" to which you can send two of your little paleolithic pawns and get three back afterwards. We enjoyed arranging the meeples into antediluvian erotic tableaux, and some of the birthing hut encounters were quite complicated indeed, adding a dexterity element to the proceedings which livened up the game immensely. In the end Chris waled the tar out of us, in fact almost lapping her poor confused husband, who perhaps was a bit logy from digesting his knackwurst & pilsner.<br /><br />Sunday night a return to the Milford weekly game group was mandatory, as in attendance was my old friend Martin. Martin is a Very Special Person and gaming with him is always a treat. Sometimes during a game he will set forth a long, detailed argument as to why I should surrender all my pieces to him, quit the game and go stand in the hallway facing the wall. Other times I might suddenly discover that he has been giving me the finger while I wasn't looking, and this for some unknown amount of time, perhaps hours, perhaps even since he first got out of the car. Almost assuredly at some low moment of bad luck or poor decision-making I will get to hear a heartfelt rendition of REM's "Everybody Hurts," a joke that has been repeated so many times that it has become a form of psychological torture. And yet I relish this cheerful sadism, because...well, actually I'm not sure why. I guess it's for the same reason that people like horseradish and tequila: it just makes you look tougher if you can stand it.<br /><br />There were nine or ten people at Joe's, and most of the group sat down to a marathon game of <i>Battlestar Galactica</i>, during the entirety of which we could hear Dan insisting vehemently that he was not a cylon while all along actually secretly he was. Left to our own devices were me, Martin, the pleasant & charming Melissa, and Eric Summerer, voice actor and noted <span style="font-style: italic;">bon vivant</span> & raconteur. We started off with a game of <i>Dominion,</i> which was followed by a game of <i>Dominion, </i>after which we enjoyed a game of <i>Dominion</i>. The first game was played with the "Hand Madness" deck as specified in the Intrigue expansion. Everyone thought that I had won, but it turned out that Eric scooched past me. For our second game we drew the setup out at random; if I remember correctly, on the table were the Shantytown, the Bridge, the Courtyard, the Noble, the Pawn, the Festival, and the Wishing Well, as well as two other cards I'm forgetting. I won this one, mostly by virtue of ignoring the cards. One of the players somehow straggled in with only seven points, and for those who don't know I have to mention that you start the game with three points already in your hand. We considered this to be a noteworthy accomplishment in itself, but I vowed to respect this player's privacy and keep her identity secret (though as a clue I will say that she has long dark hair and does not live in Milwaukee).<br /><br />We did another random setup for our third and final game, and this turned out to be one of the most cruel and hurtful <span style="font-style: italic;">Dominion </span>setups ever seen or heard of. Among the cards were the Throne Room, the Militia, the Torturer, the Thief, the Mine, the Library, the Duke, and the Secret Chamber. Were it not for the Secret Chamber we probably would have all gone broke after the first three rounds. Martin's favorite trick was to Throne Room the Torturer—in other words, to make players discard two cards twice in a row—and more than once I found myself with only one card left in my hand when it got to my turn. Luckily, more than once that remaining card was the Library. It was tough for people to put together 8 gold at a time, so dukes & duchies became quite popular. The game lasted a relatively long time, in the same way that an Olympic sprinting match would take a while if the contestants could throw rocks at each other while they were running. At the end Eric announced that he had tied me, then counted his points again and realized that he'd won. Typical.<br /><br />I must confess that I've warmed up to <span style="font-style: italic;">Dominion </span>quite a bit, and I enjoyed our three games. It's not the type of game that I typically like, because ordinarily I prefer games where players are a bit more involved with each other, but it turns out the game is quite entertaining, and it also scores points by virtue of the fact that pretty much every gamer likes it and knows the rules. Also, I happen to be fairly good at it.<br /><br />Even so, we couldn't just play <span style="font-style: italic;">Dominion </span>all night long, so I suggested a nice friendly game of <i>Ra</i>, another one of my all-time favorites. <i>Ra</i> is an auction game in which the lot up for auction starts out small and is added to turn by turn until someone caves in and starts the bidding. Instead of money, however, the players have a limited number of ranked bidding chips, each of which can only be used once in a round. There is also an unpredictable timing mechanism, and if they're not careful the round can end before players have had a chance to spend all their bidding chips.<br /><br />The setting of the game is ancient Egypt, and there are lots of different things that players can win at auction: monuments, pharaohs (i.e., political power), farms along the Nile, gold, technology, et cetera. Each of these items scores a little differently, and like <i>Taj Mahal</i> the game rewards players who are able to successfully concentrate their efforts in one particular era. By the end of the game I was able to put together a respectable collection of monuments, and I had scored some other points along the way via pharaohs and Nile farming, but Martin ended up winning the game by a healthy margin. The audacity!<br /><br />Afterwards I suggested that Melissa pick the last game of the night, since Eric had picked <i>Dominion</i>, I'd picked <i>Ra</i>, and Martin didn't want to be bothered. She pulled out <i>Taluva</i>, a game with neat-looking terraced tiles and wee little huts and temples and such. It first appeared to be about building a tropical island paradise, but then she explained the rules about how we get to destroy each other's villages with exploding volcanoes. The game ended up being a vicious free-for-all in which many hapless islanders were immolated in lava, and we all took a savage glee in beating down anyone who had the temerity to try to expand their empire beyond one miserable hut. Towards the end I made a cruel but much-admired move in which I cut Melissa off from a tower opportunity with a long chain of huts, but it turned out that the move was less clever than I thought because while I was blocking Mel from getting her first tower I failed to block Eric from getting his second, and he won the game. To congratulate him on his victory we found a real lava pit and threw him in, which was also bad for Martin because Eric was his ride.<br /><br />Thanks to everyone for a great week of gaming!Joe Golahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07660986477477676629noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8242318521539377865.post-60290565683703890002009-07-09T17:00:00.000-04:002009-07-09T17:00:00.377-04:00Dog Sleds, the French Revolution, Cheeky Monkies and Helping Your NeighborOn Friday I went down to Milford for some games 'n' barbecue at the usually-accurately-named Sunday Night Gamers, and I ended up playing some great stuff. First on the table was a new title from Asmodée, <i>Snow Tails. </i>The game recreates the thrilling sport of dog sled racing, and the players must charge across the icy wastes as fast as they can without crashing their sled into the sidelines or each other. The racing is accomplished via a hand of cards, and these cards are played onto the two dogs and also the brakes; steering is accomplished by having differing values on the two dogs. The mechanism is quite interesting, though not so involved that the game drags while the players figure out their best possible move. To further ensure that things move along at a snappy pace there is a token of shame, the "big paws" chip, which is bestowed on whichever player is taking too long with his turn. It was an exciting race; I had a huge lead coming around the second hairpin turn, but I failed to block Eric Summerer on the straightaway and he scooched past me. Eric started rehearsing his victory speech but at the last moment Joe Lee snuck by <span style="font-style: italic;">him </span>and took the gold medal or the bejeweled kibble or whatever it is you win in dog sled racing. I really enjoyed myself, and all in all I would say that <i>Snow Tails</i> is probably the best racing game I've played to date (<span style="font-style: italic;">TurfMaster </span>coming in second, the also-rans being <span style="font-style: italic;">Formula Dé, Daytona 500, Rome: Circus Maximus </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">Formula Motor Racing</span>).<br /><br />After <i>Snow Tails</i> I got a chance to play a famous classic that I had long wanted to try—Sid Sackson's deduction game <i>Sleuth</i>, first published in 1967. A deck of gem cards is dealt out except for one card which is hidden back in the box; this gem has been "stolen" and it is up to the players to discover which one it is. The players do this by questioning each other about the gems in their hands and gradually they can figure out the missing one by process of elimination. The game was a real brain-burner, but I liked it. I'd love to try it again, though perhaps with fewer players; we had five, and keeping track of four other hands was a real mental workout. I think the game would be perfect with just four.<br /><br />Third on the table was one of my old favorites, <i>Liberté</i>. I won't try to describe this game in any detail, as it is quite complex, but suffice it to say that the setting is the French Revolution. What is unusual about the game is that there is more than one path to victory; whoever has the most victory points at the end of four rounds will win, but the game can end early if there is either a radical landslide or a counterrevolution. In these cases, the victory points count for nothing and the winner is decided by who has the most radical influence (in the first case) or by who has the most loyalist influence (in the second). I ended up winning the game with a counterrevolution (abetted by Josh Y.), though I must admit that it felt a little too easy and anticlimactic. It might have happened because we had a couple of newbies at the table who didn't play aggressively to the counterrevolutionary provinces, but it might just be that the game is imbalanced and I'm only now realizing it. That's not to say that a counterrevolution is unstoppable, but if players are going to be significantly derailed from their own strategies to thwart it in every game, I consider that to be a problem.<br /><br />Afterwards I drove back to my neck of the woods and visited my pal Eric P., who had been abandoned by wife and children and so was in need of some moral support in the form of gaming. I introduced him to one of my favorite two-player games, <i>Scarab Lords</i>, about which I wrote a long-winded review <a href="http://boredgamegeeks.blogspot.com/2005/08/old-news-department-rumble-in-hekumet.html">here</a>. We played three times, and fortunately or unfortunately I beat him every time. Hopefully he'll be willing to play again.<br /><br />Eric's family eventually returned, and after his wife Chrissy put the kids to bed she joined us at the game table. First up was <i>Cheeky Monkey</i>, a press-your-luck game by Dr. Reiner Knizia. Players are trying to collect chips for points; on his turn a player will pull chips from a bag one by one; he can quit pulling chips at any time, but if he draws two matching chips—there are ten types in varying amounts—everything goes back in the bag and his turn is over. If he quits while he's ahead, he adds the chips to his stack. Players sometimes also have the ability to steal the top chips from other players' stacks, so the stacking order is important, particularly because there are bonuses for having the most of each particular type of chip. The larger bonuses ended up being decisive, and it made me wonder if players need to be more aggressive about guarding collections of certain animals.<br /><br />Last up was a game of <i>Dominion</i>. I won't say too much about this one because it's quite popular and most gamer-type folks are well aware of it. This was only my second play. Eric warned me that Chrissy was a shark, and sure enough she kicked our butts.<br /><br />All in all it was a good amount of gaming for a weekend, but there was to be some unexpected gaming as well. On the following day, the fourth of July, we were enjoying a barbecue with our neighbors and I was talking with their son about the various outdoor games one can play—foxes and hounds, capture the flag, kick the can, et cetera. Naturally we didn't have enough people for those sorts of activities, and I said that I was sorry that I hadn't brought over one of my board games. "Well, I have some games," said the neighbor kid, "<span style="font-style: italic;">Monopoly</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Lost Cities</span>...."<br /><br />"Wait, <span style="font-style: italic;">Lost Cities</span>? Really?" Lost Cities is a Knizia game, and one that I don't have, though I've played it online. I was thrilled! I told him to bring it out, and we had a very entertaining game. However, I was a bit surprised towards the end when he started feeding me cards that he knew I needed. "I'm helping you out a little, here," he said. I told him that he was helping me out a bit too much, and he said "that's okay; I don't care about winning, I just want everyone to have a good time." I was really impressed with this display of sportsmanship, particularly because when we had played a game together previously he had seemed a bit crushed when he lost. Of course my gamer instincts had kicked in and it never even occurred to me to let the little fellow win. I didn't actually care about winning or losing, though; like my young friend, I was happy just to get to play.Joe Golahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07660986477477676629noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8242318521539377865.post-59215331915481534812009-06-25T21:25:00.000-04:002009-06-25T21:25:49.135-04:00Municipium<i>Municipium</i> is a relatively new game, published last fall by the Canadian company <a href="http://valleygames.ca/">Valley Games</a> and invented by my favorite game designer, Dr. Reiner Knizia. It accommodates between two and four people and it takes between forty-five and seventy-five minutes to play, depending on the number of players and how quickly they take their turns. Within the game there is a blend of luck and skill; a crafty and experienced player will have an edge against newbies, but newbies will have a shot at winning nonetheless.<br /><br />The setting of the game is an unnamed town on the outskirts of the Roman Empire, circa 200 AD. Each player controls a family of pawns who are angling for wealth and prestige within the town, and they do this by gaining the support of the four spheres of society: the military, the merchants, the priests, and the advocates (sort of a cross between a lawyer and a congressman). In terms of game mechanisms this support is represented by the players collecting citizen tokens in four different colors. The catch is that players must gain support in all four spheres equally; when a player acquires a full set of tokens—one in each color—these are exchanged for a victory token. The first player to earn five victory tokens wins the game.<br /><br />The citizens are to be found in the seven institutions that are depicted on the board. The soldiers hang out at the tavern and the praetorium (i.e., the barracks), the merchants at the baths and the emporium (i.e., the shopping center), the advocates at the forum and the basilica (i.e., the courthouse), and the priests in the temple. Players collect citizens by moving their seven pawns around the map in the hopes of having the majority of pawns in a particular institution when it comes time to distribute the citizens in that institution. By "majority," I mean, of course, more pawns than any other player.<br /><br />Players' turns are extremely simple; they can make two moves with their pawns along the roads on the map, and then they must turn over a card from a common deck; that card will dictate how the turn ends and whether or not any citizen tokens will be distributed. In some cases the players will be instructed to each draw one citizen token from the bag and place it in a corresponding institution; for example, a merchant may be placed in either the baths or the emporium. The exception is the priest, who can be placed anywhere. If an institution accumulates three citizens, these are then distributed, with two going to the player with the majority of pawns in the institution and the remaining one going to the player in second place.<br /><br />Another possibility at the end of the turn is the movement of yet another pawn, the praefect, who is the head honcho of the Municipium. The praefect moves around the board in a clockwise direction, stopping at every institution except the temple. Whenever he moves to a new institution, he grants a favor to the player with the most influence in that institution, the favor being a little chit that the player can use as a "wild" citizen when exchanging a set of four citizen tokens for a victory token. In games with more than two players, the person with the second-most influence will get a consolation prize of one citizen token.<br /><br />The third possibility at the end of the turn is that players will be able to use the institutions' "special powers." Each institution has its own special power which is available to the player with the most influence in that institution whenever a "one power" or "all powers" card is turned over. I won't go into these in detail, but suffice it to say that they are all advantageous and add a nice degree of strategy and interest to the game. Perhaps most significant is the special power of the temple, because influence in the temple is method by which ties are broken when determining majority elsewhere on the board.<br /><br />There is one last element to the game that needs to be mentioned, which is that each player has three single-use "family cards." Instead of turning over a random card from the common deck, the players can use one of their family cards to end the turn. These are all extremely useful: one card allows the player to either move the praefect or rearrange all his pawns, one allows the player to draw four citizen tokens from the bag and place them in institutions, and the third allows the player to use the special powers of all the institutions where he or she has the majority.<br /><br />Now, in the interest of not wearing out the reader I have left out a lot of small details from the above description of the game play, but by and large I think I've provided a good overview if how the game works: players move their pawns around the board and try to have the majority of pawns in various institutions to take advantage of the various possible outcomes of the card flip, whether it be a move of the praefect, the addition of more citizens to the board, or the use of the institutions' special powers. As the game progresses and the situation evolves, some institutions will become more important than others to a player, and with the help of their three family cards players can cook up some rather involved strategies to try to get their fifth victory token and win the game.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">The overall feel of the game</span> is an interesting one. A player's turn is very simple—make two pawn moves, then flip or play a card—but at times the decisions can be tricky. What are my short-term and long-term priorities? Will my rivals be able to easily undermine my position on their turns? Is now a good time to use my family cards, or should I save them for later? However, the decisions are not so difficult that the turns drag on and on, and moreover players often have choices to make during other players' turns, so things never get dull, even with players who are on the slow side.<br /><br /><i>Municipium</i> has gotten a mixed reaction from the people to whom I have introduced it. My first two playings of the game were with crusty, hardcore gamer types, and the response was lukewarm at best; in particular they felt that the game was too luck-heavy, as both games ended with several players poised to win and the victory going ot the person who first turned over the common card most favorable to his particular situation. In the third game, however, one of the players did something rather clever, which was that he saved his "all powers" family card for a winning <i>coup de grâce</i>. This changed my perception of the game, and I began advising new players of the usefulness of the family cards at endgame; thereafter all the games had very tense finishes, with the players in contention having elaborate plans hinging on their remaining family cards. The players in these games enjoyed themselves more and said that they would be willing to play again in the future.<br /><br />I myself wasn't quite sure what to make of the game at first; there was something a bit odd and unintuitive about it all, perhaps because it breaks the familiar mode of players reacting to a random event (for example, a card draw or a die roll) and instead puts the random event <i>after</i> the player makes his move. However, as I've played it more and more I've come to really enjoy it and have found it very entertaining. I've gotten it to the table seven times now, one of those a two-player game, four three-player games and two four-player games. It works very well with all the numbers in the range, though of course a player will have a lot less control over the board in a four-player game than in a two-player game. It struck me that the two-player game was actually a very good way to introduce it to new players, since the newbie will feel more in control, and also since it removes the one confusing element, namely that of the winning of citizen tokens from both the institutions and the praefect movement.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">For those who are familiar with the game</span> and who are interested in learning a little strategy, here is what I've gleaned so far:<br /><br />• <b>The Citizen Invitations card.</b> This card can precipitate a windfall if executed at the right moment–eight citizen tokens, conceivably—and so a major priority in the mid-game is to watch for a time when there are a lot of tokens on the board and then to try to get one majority in each color and play the Citizen Invitations card. Ideally this will coincide with a moment when you have...<br /><br />• <b>Temple Majority.</b> The temple ranking (and thus the tiebreaker ranking) is extremely important. Typically the common card deck will be run through twice, which means that the All Powers card will appear twice and so the temple ranking will change twice at the very least—more if the player currently with the majority uses the temple power via a One Power or My Powers card. If you are on the bottom rung of the ladder, one of your highest priorities should be readying yourself to improve your position when the time comes. The baths can be very helpful in this respect. Ideally you should get yourself on the top rung at least once, and once you have made it to the top it is then important to move some of those pawns out of the temple and take advantage of the situation. More than once I've seen a player hole up his men in the temple to try to guard his ranking, resulting in fewer pieces everywhere else and so no real advantage.<br /><br />• <b>The My Powers card.</b> As said above, it is a good idea to save the My Powers card for the end of the game. In the early and mid-game you have the luxury of being flexible, whereas towards the end you will need to outmaneuver your competition for a specific reward. Also, because it is so powerful, the My Powers card allows you to lunge at the finish line from farther back, thus potentially taking your enemies by surprise; using the card to take the lead mid-game might only serve to make you a target for citizen-theft via the forum.Joe Golahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07660986477477676629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8242318521539377865.post-19393296504068296972009-01-23T09:04:00.005-05:002009-01-23T09:21:47.040-05:00Various & SundryI apologize for the absence of new material here on this blog in recent months. Part of that is having been caught up in the holidays, thought part of it is also not having played anything that has inspired me to write. Actually, that's not quite true; I did write a comical fictionalization of my one play of <span style="font-style:italic;">Battlestar Galactica: the Board Game</span> (found <a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/369944">here</a>), but that seemed a better fit as a boardgamegeek session report than as a blog post. <br /><br />I had high hopes for one particular new release, namely <span style="font-style:italic;">Municipium</span>, designed by Reiner Knizia and published by Valley Games, but I've only played it twice and I'm not sure I have anything coherent to say about it yet. Sadly, I don't how quickly it's going to get to the table again, because it got a lukewarm reaction from the people to whom I introduced it. Specifically they felt that there was too much luck in the endgame—in both games several players were one step away from the win and the game was decided by who turned over the right common card for their situation. I'm not convinced that this is something that is necessarily going to happen every game, however. Moreover, I'm wondering whether it had anything to do with the fact that both games had four players; in both games the twelve-card common deck was reshuffled right before the end of the game, whereas it seems that three players would finish their game before the common deck was reshuffled. This would mean that players would have a better idea of what was left in the deck and could plan for it, thus reducing the feeling that the outcome was dictated by blind luck. <br /><br />I should probably make an all-out effort to get the game to the table again so I can write something up about it, but there is another goal/obsession which tempts me even more, so much so that I am willing to set aside a brand-new Knizia game so that I can pursue it. What it is is that I am finally within striking distance of getting rid of my much-hated "unplayed" list, which is to say that I am only two games away from having played every game in my collection. The first offending title is <span style="font-style:italic;">Die Sieben Weisen</span>—German for "The Seven Magi," I think—which is a partnership card game about dueling wizards. I bought this a little over two years ago when I was collecting Alea games; at that time I already owned at least two Alea games that I had never played, but it was an out-of-print title that I found for a reasonable price, so I snapped it up. The other hold-out is <span style="font-style:italic;">Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde</span>, another partnership card game which I am embarrassed to say I bought five years ago and which I still haven't played. <br /><br />Speaking of card games, I might as well throw out a mention of the one game I've enjoyed the most lately, which is <span style="font-style:italic;">Die Sieben Siegel</span>, or "The Seven Seals." This is a trick-taking game similar to "spades" in which players try to predict what tricks they will take, though instead of receiving victory points for correct guesses they receive penalty points for incorrect guesses. Additionally, one player per hand gets to be the "saboteur"; this player does not have to make a prediction, but rather starts the round with four penalty points and is allowed to reduce that total by one for each extra trick that another player takes. The idea is that you try to avoid taking tricks that you ordinarily "ought" to take—for example, by holding back high cards—so that your opponents take tricks that they didn't expect to.<br /><br />The game is one for veteran trick-takers only, I think, because tyros will be content to simply fulfill their predictions, whereas what the game is really about is screwing up your opponents, <i>even if you're not the saboteur</i>. There is a delightful nastiness to the game, delightful because it's not arbitrary—you can't necessarily stick it to a particular player just because you feel like it, but all sorts of opportunities arise where you can throw metaphorical cream pies in your opponents' faces.<br /><br />Perhaps most importantly, I like <span style="font-style:italic;">Die Sieben Siegel</span> because I'm kind of good at it.<br /><br />The one criticism of the game that I've heard is that the saboteur has it too easy; the maximum number of points that the saboteur can take is only four, whereas otherwise a really unlucky player could conceivably take many more. I think this is a valid criticism, but the issue doesn't bother me. I don't automatically take the saboteur just because I can, because unless I have a hand that's well-suited for the role (which is to say a hand that has high cards and which has a disproportionate number of cards in one or two suits), I find it more fun and interesting to be a regular player.Joe Golahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07660986477477676629noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8242318521539377865.post-15075866566370149002008-10-09T07:08:00.000-04:002008-10-09T11:48:08.654-04:00Bohnanza: If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix ItIn 1999 or so, back when I had just started to get interested in gaming again, I bought a funny little German card game called <i>Bohnanza</i>. The title is a pun on the English word <i>bonanza</i> and the German word for <i> bean</i>, which is <i>bohn.</i> In the game players must plant and harvest beans for cash, though in order to do this with any degree of success the players will have to trade beans with each other, as there are a limited number of fields and larger plantings lead to bigger profits.<br /><br />The game was a huge success with my family and friends, and we played it fairly regularly for a year or two. The fact that all the little bean names were in German only added to the charm, and words like <i>rote bohn</i> and <i>brechbohn</i> quickly entered our everyday vocabulary. Eventually we moved on to different things, but the game continued to gain a wider audience and in the U.S. and ultimately an English version was published by Rio Grande Games in 2000.<br /><br />There were two significant differences between the two editions, however: the Rio Grande edition had incorporated part of the first German expansion into the base game, adding between twenty-six and forty-six cards to the deck depending on the number of players, and including variants for two, six and seven players. <br /><br />In the past few years I've played the six-player version of the game twice, and I found it to be a bit of a chore. With that many people haggling for trades, progress slowed down to a creep, and what was once a fun little half-hour game became an hour-long slog. I decided that the decision to expand the game to more players was a mistake, but I didn't have anything against the U.S. version otherwise. <br /><br />However, just this past weekend I played the U.S. version with four players, and I discovered that even when playing with a smaller group at the table the Rio Grande rules compared poorly with the German version. There were twenty-six extra cards in the deck, increasing its size by 25%, and increasing the length of a game by a bit more than that because players go through the deck three times. You might think that if <i>Bohnanza</i> is fun to play it can only be a good thing to increase the length of the game, but somehow the math doesn't work. It might have to do with how the game develops; after a certain point you're simply doing the same things repeatedly, and deferring the conclusion makes things seem draggy. In general, no matter how fun a game is, length has to be justified by depth or some kind of larger development or story arc. A game can have repetition, but some kind of finish line needs to be in sight, whether it be the end of a round or the end of the game, or the tension becomes watered down. There is a delicate balance that has to be struck, because if the game is too short it can feel like everything depended on the turn of one or two cards and that skill didn't enter into it. An example of this might be the Reiner Knizia card game <i>Katzenjammer Blues</i>. On the other hand, if the game goes on too long, the individual plays can feel insignificant. A good example of this would be the Alan Moon board game <i>Wongar</i>. So, it strikes me that it would be more fun to play two half-hour games of the old <i>Bohnanza</i> than one hour-long game of the new <i>Bohnanza</i>. <br /><br />The point of all this is that if you are someone who owns the Rio Grande edition of the game and ever felt that something was lacking, you might want to try taking out the coffee, wax and cocoa beans and limiting the game to five players or fewer. Why? Because sometimes shorter is sweeter.Joe Golahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07660986477477676629noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8242318521539377865.post-35057895319303685702008-09-17T10:57:00.004-04:002008-09-17T12:39:32.932-04:00Witch's BrewMost people are familiar with the game "rock-paper-scissors." Certainly it's not the most fascinating way to spend one's time, but it is a useful method for deciding something arbitrarily on the playground, like who gets to play first base or who has to sneak up and depants Jay Durham in front of the girls. Gamers call this "simultaneous action selection," and it's a mechanism that is often used to drive what happens in a game. It allows there to be uncertainty and surprise, but with a bit more player involvement than just the rolling of dice. Ideally, the various possible outcomes will be more interesting than the all-or-nothing nature of rock-paper-scissors, and ideally players will have different goals and motivations that must be deduced. If players can make educated guesses as to what the other people at the table want to have happen, there can also be a fun/agonizing element of second guessing: if so-and-so knows that I want to do X, shouldn't I surprise him by doing Y instead? But won't he know that I know that he knows that I want to do X, and so block that move instead? But in that case I could go ahead and do X with impunity! Or...or...or....<br /><br />Many well-known board games have utilized this mechanism to good effect, including <i>Adel Verpflichtet</i>, originally published in Germany in 1990 and later published in English as <i>By Hook or By Crook</i> and <i>Hoity Toity</i>; <i>Roborally</i>, published in 1994; and the classic <i>Diplomacy</i>, published way back in 1959. <i>Adel Verpflichtet</i> is an interesting case because it is a relatively abstract game and yet there is a wide variety of possible outcomes depending on the choices that the players make; players can exhibit collections of Meerschaum pipes and advertising placards for points, they can try to steal <i>objets d'art</i> from other player's collections, they can set a detective to catch thieves, et cetera.<br /><br />Last night at Matt L.'s Tuesday night game group I got to play a brand-new game which utilizes this mechanism, namely <i>Witch's Brew</i>, published by Rio Grande Games here in the U.S. In the game players are trying to brew up various sinister potions and vile tinctures to score points, and there are many different ways to accomplish this goal: there are bubbling cauldrons, eldritch incantations, and mysterious alchemical procedures. If all else fails, you can just beg and steal. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3ndSpB1v4XB3KzYhbaEth-H0lK-mDWRcYBRGuHfCEoX12xAfd_g5EUqBPnv2dYHSh8ENvf9UOyw0ud9AYQ7MCGJARsMnIfmrxY3fpju8zQGLaHszb10Rn7ugs4Mkxlpn5CKK22-YkPP4/s1600-h/Game_277_imageBoxCover.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3ndSpB1v4XB3KzYhbaEth-H0lK-mDWRcYBRGuHfCEoX12xAfd_g5EUqBPnv2dYHSh8ENvf9UOyw0ud9AYQ7MCGJARsMnIfmrxY3fpju8zQGLaHszb10Rn7ugs4Mkxlpn5CKK22-YkPP4/s400/Game_277_imageBoxCover.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5247029610932498818" /></a>What's interesting about <i>Witch's Brew</i> is that instead of players revealing their choices simultaneously, there is a turn order element. Players each have identical hands of twelve role cards, and each round they choose five of these that they are going to play. The player who "leads" will lay down one of the role cards, which might say something like "I am the alchemist!" Going around the table, any other player who has the alchemist card in their hand can say "no, <i>I</i> am the alchemist"—and, at their discretion, some epithet like "punk" or "sucka." The last person to play the alchemist card gets to take the role and all the other pretenders get bupkes... <b>except</b> every player with an alchemist card after the first has the option of playing conservatively and saying "so be it!" In this case they bow out of the fight and accept a lesser reward, but one which is still better than nothing. In these instances is it usually not appropriate to say "punk" or "sucka." <br /><br />Mark, Donna, Alan and I played a four-player game, and we had a pretty good time with it. Early on Mark was a thorn in my side, always choosing the same cards as I did and one-upping me, but his luck soon changed and he found himself poorly prepared to perpetrate potions. Alan's performance, I regret to say, was somewhere between hapless and disastrous. It was like watching a freight train go off the rails, tumble down a hillside, crash into a molasses factory, continue on through a large, dirty hen house, and finally come to rest, steaming and defiled, in the middle of some Main Street just at the moment that a parade was scheduled to pass through. If you want you can pause in your reading and take a few moments to close your eyes and picture all that in detail. Don't forget to include a group of teenage girls dressed in majorette uniforms huddled in a group and saying "<i>ewwwww</i>" for maximum embarrassment. <br /><br />My potion-brewing abilities, however, were simply astounding, dare I say breathtaking. Donna made a game attempt to outpace my juggernaut-like success, but I spanked her down as I would any impudent pup. Can you overmatch perfection? Can you defeat destiny? No, you cannot, Donna. Not even hardly.<br /><br />Which is all a roundabout way of saying that I lucked into the win.<br /><br />And, to be sure, there is a fair amount of luck involved in the game, though smartness and savvy play a part as well. Moreover, even if the game is not a pure strategic contest of wits, it makes up for this by providing a lot of opportunity for groaning and cheering and all other manner of carryings-on. In fact, afterwards the other table informed us that we were behaving very noisily. We blamed it all on Alan.Joe Golahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07660986477477676629noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8242318521539377865.post-3148624325712626142008-08-28T14:08:00.000-04:002008-08-28T14:12:33.825-04:00Old FavoritesLast weekend I drove over to Milford to attend the weekly meeting of the "Sunday Night Gamers," a group which has been around for six or seven years. The host has a collection of about one hundred and eighty board and card games, and attendance will range anywhere from five to twelve people, with eight being the average.<br /><br />In order to avoid a lot of discussion and waffling, the host has a "pick list" which rotates through the various members of the group. If your name is next up on the list on game night, you get to pick the next game to be played (or one of the games, as there are almost always two tables in use). If your name comes up and you're absent, you miss your pick and you have to wait until the next time your name rolls around. This system might sound a little harsh and arbitrary to some, but it suits the group and it keeps things moving quickly.<br /><br />The first two choices were <i>Imperial</i> and <i>El Grande</i>, and I chose to sit in on the latter. I have a soft spot in my heart for <i>El Grande</i> because it was one of the first games that I bought when I started to get re-interested in gaming in the late '90s. My opponents were Keith C., Megan, Al Shapiro and Mark Casiglio. It was Megan's first time playing, and Mark informed us that "the next time I don't come in last in <i>El Grande</i> will be the <i>first</i> time I don't come in last in <i>El Grande</i>." Kind people that we are, we arranged for him to extend his coming-in-last streak one more game.<br /><br />The central mechanism of the game is what is called "area influence" or "area majority," which means that players are placing tokens down onto the various regions of a map and scoring points in the areas in which they have the majority of tokens. How they go about doing this is actually somewhat complicated, though, and in addition to putting down tokens on each turn they also get to interfere with the state of the board in some small or large way: potentially they can move other people's tokens around, or change the amount that a region scores, or score a region an extra time, et cetera. It's a fun and engaging game which keeps the players' brains spinning and their teeth grinding. The only catch is that you can unexpectedly find yourself hoisted by the drawers and left hanging on a flag pole, metaphorically speaking, so it helps to have somewhat thick skin.<br /><br />I was in the lead after the first scoring, but this was not to last. Al advanced ahead of me, and then Keith, and ultimately even Megan sashayed past me on the scoring track. After the second scoring Keith had a strong lead, which was particularly notable because he had gotten beaten up pretty badly in the early game, but Megan and Al both had good board position. As we moved into round eight I began to see that I was hopelessly out of the running. <br /><br />In the end, Megan, who had never played before, won it by a point. I forget whether it was Al or Keith who came in second, but the other person was only a few points behind those two. Their scores were somewhere in the neighborhood of 110. Mine was more like 95. Megan said that this was the first game she had ever won at the Sunday Night Gamers, but none of the rest of us believed it.<br /><br />Had I played a poor game? I don't know...I think it was more of a case of the three leaders playing a very good one. More than once I felt moved to compliment Al on a crafty move. Even so, I know that I didn't put enough tokens on the board and didn't spread out enough; in one case I had six tokens in a region that was only earning me a point. Regardless, I felt extremely disappointed by my fourth-place finish. I had expected to fare a lot better, especially considering that I had probably played the game more times than anyone else at the table except Al. <br /><br />Mark and Al left at this point, and the next two games were <i>Entdecker</i> and <i>Amun-Re</i>. I had always wanted to try <i>Entdecker</i>, but I was feeling a little tired and I thought I would stick to a game which I was already familiar with. My opponents were Keith C., Megan, Josh Young, and Chris B. Everyone had played before, though Megan needed a rules refresher. <br /><br /><i>Amun-Re</i> is another favorite of mine, particularly because it is one of the few games that I am actually <i>good at</i>; I don't know if my win-loss average is that astonishing, but I am usually at least a strong contender. <br /><br />The game is set in ancient Egypt, and the map is divided into fifteen regions. Every region is different, and each one can be useful in particular situations. A region near the Nile might have a lot of farmland, whereas another region might contain extra resources or VP-scoring temples. The game is divided into two kingdoms, the old and the new, and each kingdom has three rounds. Each round a number of regions is auctioned off to the players, so that at the end of the bidding every player will have one new region. Players then buy farmers to till the land and pyramids to celebrate their own personal gloriousness. At the end of the round players will sacrifice money to the great god Amon-Ra. If the total sacrifice is large, then the Nile will rise and players will earn lots of money per farmer. If players are stingy (and they can even steal from the sacrifice, the infidels), then the harvest will be poor. In this case, however, the players who invested in provinces with trade connections will earn extra money. <br /><br />After three rounds the Old Kingdom ends and civilization abruptly collapses. The players lose their territories, all the farmers come off the board, and the cycle repeats. The interesting wrinkle of the New Kingdom is that now there are also pyramids on the board, and this changes what the various provinces might be worth. <br /><br />Anyway, I will cut a long post short and just say that I won the game by a nice, healthy margin—my finishing score was thirty-nine, and the next highest score (Josh's) was perhaps ten points behind me. I scored no power cards in the New Kingdom, but I was able to snag all four temples, and some generous sacrificing in the final round made these worth a total of twelve points. <br /><br />I had to leave at this point, and I still got home rather a bit on the late side. I keep telling myself that next time I'm only going to stay for the first game, but I never stick to that promise....<br /><br />In the spirit of completeness I should mention that I also played a short game of catch with Rand the dog. Does anyone know how to log that on BGG?Joe Golahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07660986477477676629noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8242318521539377865.post-4171954493448190102008-08-23T21:06:00.001-04:002008-08-23T22:06:21.109-04:00Tzaar Strategy?So, for what it's worth, here's my extreme <i>Tzaar</i> setup.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTlmLVR5_2G2vU8QP0C8aULuuQbP4nq8LzgARob2RYiYkMYkY8BJGyVrBQCgJ3qmGnrZurX6nLl7jLY73m-8r2_NSTQDiR_xHKRxYil3n7OpCE3xknGQYoT_BpY4i9KdIM4_moA6J-mU4/s1600-h/Tzaar+setup.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTlmLVR5_2G2vU8QP0C8aULuuQbP4nq8LzgARob2RYiYkMYkY8BJGyVrBQCgJ3qmGnrZurX6nLl7jLY73m-8r2_NSTQDiR_xHKRxYil3n7OpCE3xknGQYoT_BpY4i9KdIM4_moA6J-mU4/s400/Tzaar+setup.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5237884548623468450" /></a><br /><br />What does it mean? Probably nothing. Obviously black is spread pretty thin, though this would not necessarily have to be the case just because one puts a piece on the edge. However, the edge spaces would seem to have less mobility than pieces in the interior. Outer corner pieces have only three directions in which to move and potential access to eleven intersections; other outer edge pieces have two directions in which to move and potential access to twelve intersections. On the other end of the scale, the six pieces in the second-innermost ring which are not in the radial lines (D6, F6, G4, F3, D3 and C4) can move in six directions and have potential access to twenty intersections. Of course, the converse is that these pieces can be <span style="font-style:italic;">attacked </span>from all these positions!<br /><br />Perhaps what is more important than location is the concentration of pieces. If I'm on the defensive—that is, if the other player is always a step ahead of me in terms of the tallest stack—I would like my tallest stack to be behind a buffer of my other pieces. Player put pressure on each other by executing a capture-stack move where the resulting stack threatens the opponent's highest stack; this is difficult for my opponent to do if I am behind a wall of my own pieces, though not impossible if he attacks this wall then backs away to stack.<br /><br />The question is, will every game follow this pattern of the two big stacks (most likely tzaar-stacks) chasing each other around until one of the other piece type starts to disappear (most likely tzarras)? Quite possibly. At that point players might need to stack these tzaaras to keep them safe, ideally out of range of the tall opposing tzaar stack. This then might be the critical juncture of the game, the point to which everything builds. In that case, assuming that the players are skillful enough to keep their large tzaar stacks from being lost, the focus of the early game would be to capture the opponent's pieces in such a way that his large tzaar stack is isolated from his remaining tzaaras*, which are in turn within reach of the player's own large tzaar stack, and prevent the opponent from doing the same. A tall order! If this is indeed the starting point for all <i>Tzaar</i> strategy, then we could say that white has a better setup than black in the picture above, because some of its tzaara are well protected. <br /><br />Interesting....<br /><br />__________________<br /><br />* Or totts, if that's the way the game shakes out. One needs to keep in mind that players are eating their own pieces when they stack; if a player exclusively eats his totts (that sounds like a line from a highbrow breakfast cereal commercial, by the way), these might end up being scarcer than the tzaaras.<br /><br />It suddenly occurs to me that a player might well want to eat his own tzaars to build his monster stack. He would be putting all his eggs into one basket, to be sure, but if the big tzaar-stack gets taken I'm not sure that the player really has much of a fighting chance anyway.Joe Golahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07660986477477676629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8242318521539377865.post-61261328066532453602008-08-18T10:30:00.000-04:002008-08-18T21:56:49.830-04:00Ten Games into TzaarI've now played ten games of <i>Tzaar</i>, and you would think that I would have something clever to say about it by this point, but you would be wrong. In fact, all the evidence suggests that I am not particularly good at the game yet. I have managed to learn one important lesson, though.<br /><br />Early on I decided to explore a strategy of favoring capturing over stacking; the idea was that I would reduce my opponent's options relative to mine, thus giving me an advantage in the endgame. Moreover, I find with perfect information games that one can learn the quickest by adopting an extreme strategy and and seeing why it <i>doesn't</i> work. Had I taken a few minutes to think it through, however, I would have realized that this was not an approach with much promise. By the end of the game my opponent did indeed have fewer pieces than I did, because he had spent more turns making stacks, but his few stacks could capture any of my many pieces and my many pieces couldn't capture his few stacks. Despite having more pieces, I ran out of captures before he did. <br /><br />In my next series of games I made a point of stacking on almost every turn, but even so things did not go well for me. What ended up happening was that my opponent and I would each build one large tzaar stack and then these two stacks would chase each other around the board, trying to pick each other off for the win (as all the other tzaar pieces had gotten gobbled up). I lost all three of these games, but not because I lost my monster stack; instead I lost sight of the victory conditions, and I was blindsided by the loss of all of one other kind of piece. Even worse, in one game I had had an opportunity to win by eliminating my opponent's totts and I didn't even notice; I think I had unconsciously dismissed the possibility of winning this way because the totts are so plentiful in the early game. <br /><br />Partly I blame that 0-3 sweep on tiredness, as I had not slept well the previous night, so I was determined to make a better showing this past Saturday, when I was a bit more rested and ready. This time I was careful to keep an eye on how many pieces we both had left of each type. It looked as though it was going to be another loss for me after I made a careless move and lost a four-stack, but I pressed on and managed to earn a win. My opponent had taller stacks than I did, but I won a positional victory by ducking my pieces away and leaving him without a capture. It was a close game, however, and it could have easily gone either way in the end.<br /><br />I would have hoped that after ten games of <span style="font-style:italic;">Tzaar</span> I would have more to say about strategy than "stacks are good," but I'm afraid that that's as far as I've gotten. The only other trend I've noticed is that our games tended to end "on the edges," which is to say that the final pieces were usually situated at the edge of the board rather than the middle. However, whether that means that the edges are the best defensive position or that my brother and I simply have a tendency to start in the middle and work our way outward, I don't know. <br /><br />So far the game has a more amorphous feel to me than any of the other games in the Gipf Project, even more so than the volatile <i>Yinsh</i>; I don't find myself building towards some strategic goal or angling for a particular board position, rather I just try to menace my opponent's stacks, avoid the opposite, and look ahead to see how the endgame might develop. I still consider this an early impression, however, and I am looking for ways to improve at the game. Interestingly, the tournament rules have the players choose the placement of their pieces as opposed to seeding the board randomly, and this would suggest that there is something going on positionally. Actually, I assume that this is the case, particularly because I feel strongly that all the other Gipf Project games play best with their tournament rules, with the basic and intermediate rules just being watered-down versions of the "real game." Unfortunately, I haven't the foggiest idea of what approach I would adopt if I had to choose the placement of my pieces on the board in <i>Tzaar</i>. Probably the best way to explore placement would be to play a couple of games against myself using extreme setups, for example inner vs. outer, clustered vs. unclustered, et cetera.<br /><br />Regardless, none of this means that I think that <i>Tzaar</i> is dull or not worth playing. The game is still fun and challenging, and what's nice is that a smart newbie might well have a fair chance of winning against someone who's played ten times, which is probably not something you could say about <i>Gipf</i>, <i>Zertz</i> or <i>Dvonn</i>.Joe Golahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07660986477477676629noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8242318521539377865.post-39918509554273318982008-08-15T13:21:00.000-04:002008-08-15T13:57:00.771-04:00Like Fish in a Barrel/Igor H. SteinTwo nights ago I got an unexpected call from gaming pal Eric. <br /><br />"Hey, how's it going?"<br /><br />"Pretty good, how are you?"<br /><br />"Not bad. What's going on?"<br /><br />"Agreekolassantanga!"<br /><br />"What?" For a second I thought he might be putting some sort of voodoo curse on me.<br /><br />"Agricola's on Tanga!"<br /><br />"Ohhh..."<br /><br />For those who don't know, tanga.com is a website that runs limited-time-offer sales on various products; some of the stuff they sell is, you might say, "of appeal to only a narrow percentage of the population," but every so often they will throw in a really good deal on a board game to drive traffic to their site. This might sound like a somewhat bizarre business plan, but it makes more sense if you know that Tanga evolved from a game company which went under and was left with lots of unsold stock on its hands.<br /><br />So, Tanga was selling Agricola for five dollars less than the next-cheapest online price, and Eric wanted to bring the cost down even further by splitting the shipping with another board game enthusiast. This was a matter of no small urgency, however, because Tanga's board game offerings usually sell out quickly, and on top of that there is an Agricola-related mass hysteria currently taking place in the hobby because the game has proven to be extremely popular and and there are not nearly enough copies to go around. <br /><br />"I have to think about it," I said. I gave it one second's thought. "Okay, let's do it." <br /><br />Up to that moment I was undecided on whether I wanted to spring for a copy of the game; certainly I thought it would be neat to have, but then on the other hand forty-five dollars is also neat to have. I figured it made the most sense to try to play the game another time with someone else's copy and then decide if I wanted to buy it, even knowing that by the time that happened the first printing would probably be sold out and I might have to wait some number of months to get the game on my own shelf. In the end, however, "sale price" and "limited time offer" trumped cool-headedness and frugality, as it usually does. <br /><br />Immediately afterwards I was explaining to my wife that Eric and I had scored a coup of sorts. "I guarantee you that there will be a post on boardgamegeek announcing the sale with many exclamation points, and that there will already be a follow-up post announcing that the game has sold out."<br /><br />"Okay, let's see." <br /><br />We went over to the computer and sure enough, all was as I described. In addition, there was a very bitter post from someone who had missed out on the deal. From the first announcement to the second there was a span of only fifteen minutes. <br /><br />All this fuss over a glorified Hungry Hungry Hippos might cause some of the non-gamers out there to wonder if board game enthusiasts are a bit funny in the head. I think I will get little argument when I assert that the answer is yes. <br /><br />While we're on the subject of Tanga, I'll throw this little doozy at you. Click to view at full size.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2lw3l-23kavCTW6AM8Dc5YJLQ1BViQkvSZKO33mFINPcPBxJ2FhzkfoqJzyDo145TXIpeaUNGkduC_gDzQuMQ48aKqI_r5dbFnVW9a2yzf6exdoqPoFD_3EfJE9WsSMihoWexoMmAxfs/s1600-h/Tarot+Tanga.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2lw3l-23kavCTW6AM8Dc5YJLQ1BViQkvSZKO33mFINPcPBxJ2FhzkfoqJzyDo145TXIpeaUNGkduC_gDzQuMQ48aKqI_r5dbFnVW9a2yzf6exdoqPoFD_3EfJE9WsSMihoWexoMmAxfs/s400/Tarot+Tanga.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234796238068490034" /></a><br /><br />To keep the gaming freaks entertained while non-game-related merchandise is up for sale, Tanga has published daily puzzles, and eventually they invited users to submit their own. This was something I cooked up but which was rejected by the editors as being too difficult (even when provided with the explanation of how it works). There is a one-word answer. First person to figure it out wins nothing. Copyright Joe Golaetcetera. Have fun.Joe Golahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07660986477477676629noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8242318521539377865.post-28277765193517799822008-08-12T11:27:00.000-04:002008-08-12T14:42:03.219-04:00Coming AttractionsJust a quick note to say that I have a backlog of gaming stuff to write about, and hopefully it'll all be appearing here soon: I've gotten in more plays of Tzaar (which is not to say that I've improved at the game any), I've been back over to both Sandy Hook and Milford, I had a visit from a gaming pal from New Jersey (plus his better half), and I even twice got to play a hot-off-the-press preorder copy of Agricola.* <br /><br />Regarding the last-mentioned, I'll just say that I enjoyed the experience, mostly, but I really need to play again before I can feel like I have a handle on the game. Agricola is somewhat complicated, in that every turn players have many, many options to choose from, and I don't feel like I'm yet skilled enough to be able to judge it fairly. I mean, was the game a struggle at times because I was playing inefficiently, or will it always have a frustrating aspect to it? I have faith that the answer is the former, but even so I'd need to try it again before I could say for sure. It also needs to be seen whether the huge number of choices feels more manageable with familiarity; there were definitely moments when I felt that the possibilities were overwhelming (I still don't know what half of the major improvements do) but this also might be a result of inexperience.<br /><br />I do feel enthusiastic about the game, though. It's fun (or at least the parts when my farmers weren't begging on the street were fun), it left me aching to try it again to improve my performance, it's beautifully produced, and it does a wonderful job of evoking its theme. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbXVCeU3O0DDKeU2m7HBV26bSEa4dIh3RTrhpHf0ezDjP0JgeV8Fn0yikQbxnuIZVy-Hf41SC1b9hNnUwvDdqi54f7z_94oIr5mrAZFBcmfOjCX99KOe8b-oib-qu39MknPZG98UC4fpw/s1600-h/agricola_cover.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbXVCeU3O0DDKeU2m7HBV26bSEa4dIh3RTrhpHf0ezDjP0JgeV8Fn0yikQbxnuIZVy-Hf41SC1b9hNnUwvDdqi54f7z_94oIr5mrAZFBcmfOjCX99KOe8b-oib-qu39MknPZG98UC4fpw/s400/agricola_cover.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5233692911109390578" /></a><br />(picture courtesy of Z-Man Games)<br />_________________________<br /><br />* For those of you who have the good sense not to keep tabs on something as frivolous as board gaming news, Agricola, just-released from Z-Man Games, is the game which for the past ten months has been the cause of a tremendous amount of noisy lovelorn sighing from those who have been lucky enough to be in the same room as a copy in English (the German version, published by Lookout Games, has been around since October).Joe Golahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07660986477477676629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8242318521539377865.post-43249111381767516592008-07-07T13:29:00.000-04:002008-07-31T11:33:13.381-04:00Medici vs. Strozzi<i>Medici vs. Strozzi</i>, designed by Reiner Knizia and published by Abacus Spiele in Germany and Rio Grande Games in the United States, is an interesting two-player game in which the players are loading commodity tiles onto their three boats and assigning the boats to three harbors. There are five kinds of commodity, dye, fur, spice, cloth and gold. At the end of each of the three rounds, each harbor pays out twenty florins for the highest total value of all commodities sold—each commodity tile has a value between zero and five. There are also bonuses for "monopolies" in certain types of commodity; the monopolies are tracked with little meters on the harbors; every time I end the round having sold one more tile of a particular type of commodity at that harbor, the meter moves one space towards me. The meters do not reset at the beginning of a round, so early monopolies can be quite advantageous.<br /><br />Players acquire tiles in a somewhat unusual fashion. One player will blindly draw up to three tiles out of a bag and then set a price. The other player may choose to buy the goods for that price if he wishes, with the money going to the bank. If he does not choose to buy the goods, the player who drew the goods <i>must</i> purchase them for that amount. Whoever purchases the goods gains control of the bag and pulls out the next set of tiles.<br /><br />Each round ends when one player's boats have been filled. There are other rules involved in the loading of boats which make things interesting but aren't quite worth detailing here.<br /><br />A couple of weeks ago I played my third game of <i>MvS</i> against my brother. I had won the first game, but he had clobbered me in the second. The lesson I learned in that second game, and which should have been obvious in retrospect, was that the monopolies are worth a bit more in the first round, as the monopoly meters persist from round to round. My brother was setting prices that I thought were too high in the first round, and the round ended with me having filled up very little of my cargo space. At the end of the second round, I was sixty or eighty florins behind him. <br /><br />This last game was the opposite; this time, I was the one who was setting high prices in the first round and trying to get traction on the monopolies. I ended the round a few florins behind my brother, but I had a monopoly edge going into the next round. In the second round my brother was setting extremely high prices, and I think I ended up with only two goods loaded. Regardless, I still earned a lot of points, and at the end of the reckoning I was eighty points ahead. <br /><br />We didn't play the third round—I noted our positions and we might pick the game up next weekend, but it will be hard for my brother to bounce back from that kind of deficit.<br /><br />Overall, I think <i>Medici vs. Strozzi</i> is a neat game. It's engaging, it's beautiful to look at, and there is an amazing amount of depth to it considering how short the rules are. However, though the waters run deep, they are also a bit murky; there are so many nebulous factors which come into play that setting the "right" price can be a very difficult task. At first glance it might seem that everything is calculable, but it isn't so; this is only the case at the very end of the third round. Players must take into account the fact that monopolies persist from one round to the next and the fact that the buyer gets control of the bag. Payers must also be concerned with the end of the round and how many empty spots there are in their cargo holds (I did not go into the rules for allocation of commodities into the holds, but suffice it to say that there are times when a set of goods is more valuable to one player than to the other, and orchestrating and capitalizing on these situations is key to success). Beyond that, there is the matter of simple psychology; what misconceptions might my opponent have, and how can I exploit that?<br /><br />There's also something which is a little unintuitive about the game; in particular I have read complaints that the game doesn't make sense because players can end the game having lost money. For those who have played and are mystified by this phenomenon or feel it anti-thematic, here is a explanation that I wrote elsewhere: <br /><br /><blockquote>The reason that players end up in the hole is not because they're playing poorly but because the game is not modeling real-world business. There is no "bottom line"; players are only concerned with their profit/loss <i>relative to each other</i>. Here's a super-simplified analogy:<br /><br />Imagine that two rival donkey salesmen have their stalls across the street from each other. These donkey salesman aren't ordinary donkey salesmen, however, because neither care about the profit margins on the donkeys. They're not even trying to make a living. All they care about, vindictive jerks that they are, is that their rival does not have a better profit/loss than they do. In short, <i>they would rather lose five dollars than see their rival make six.</i><br /><br />A donkey wholesaler comes through town and auctions a donkey to the two retail salesman. Well, both salesman know that the retail price for a donkey is fifty dollars, and because of their competitive mania, the wholesale auction price of the donkey is also going to be fifty dollars. One would not suffer the other to buy the donkey for even $49.99, because he'd be making an entire penny!<br /><br />With that in mind, you can understand how if two players somehow played a "perfect game" of <i>Medici vs. Strozzi</i> they would both end the game breaking even.<br /><br />Except that you can gain ground on your opponent in cases when a lot is worth more to you than it is to your opponent. For example, if you have the marker just before the +10 bonus on your side; a matching tile for you would move it to 10, whereas if your opponent wins the tile his situation remains the same. If the tile had no other effect on income, the correct price to set is five. If your opponent allows you to buy it, you make a five dollar profit. If your opponent buys it, he is spending five dollars and getting nothing in return. Either way, you there is now a five dollar difference between your fortunes and your opponent's.</blockquote><br />Anyway, what this all means is that the game can be maddeningly opaque at times—not so much as to spoil the fun, but perhaps just enough to keep it from being ranked among my favorite two-player games. Of course, this might be my inexperience talking and I might gain a deeper appreciation with more plays, so take what I say with a grain of salt.Joe Golahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07660986477477676629noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8242318521539377865.post-69500190954122463692008-06-26T12:48:00.000-04:002008-07-31T11:36:30.001-04:00Bear vs. Virus: The Final ConflictOn Saturday night Eric & Chris from Sandy Hook hosted not only gaming but also events of a barbecueish nature. Naturally Mark Casiglio and his son Matt were in attendance as well. I had one hot dog and one hamburger, in that order. Current score: Joe Gola: 914, hot dogs: 0. I think it is very likely that my dominion over hot dogs will continue unabated. Their best hope for a late-game comeback would involve someone inventing a four-hundred-pound frankfurter and dropping it on me unawares, perhaps from a crane. Either that or a number of hot dogs would have to join together to form a larger organism; instead of being a multicellular creature it would be a multifrank creature, and possibly the individual sausages will specialize in function, with some being lung hot dogs, some liver hot dogs, and some heart hot dogs. Instead of blood it would have mustard in its veins, or possibly chili. <br /><br />All that aside, we also played some games. First on the table was the aforementioned <i>Clash of the Gladiators</i>. The game is fairly simple in concept: the players field a number of teams of gladiators and then take turns attacking each other. The details are a bit more involved, however; each team starts with four gladiators, and there are five different types of gladiator. The team as a whole starts with one die, and each swordsman adds an additional die to the roll. Prong bearers allow one re-roll and shield carriers absorb one simple hit. Net casters disable one of the opposing team members, and spear holders can change who gets to roll first.<br /><br />One of the problems inherent to this type of game is that of player elimination, which refers to the potential for players to be be kicked out of the game before it is over because all of their units have been killed. <i>Clash</i> cleverly solves this problem by allowing players to take over wild animals after all of their gladiators have met their grisly end. The game goes on until there is only one player with teams left on the board, and then players earn points for men and animals killed and any surviving gladiators.<br /><br />Eric and Chris had not played before, and I made a point of mentioning how useful the shield carriers are, and they did in fact take my advice. To my surprise the net casters were also popular, and indeed they are a very good choice when there are a lot of shield carriers on the board. The prong bearers were not a very hot commodity, however. I think there may have only been about three in play. Also, because the kids were watching, I was careful to change killing to "capturing" in my rules explanation and said that the little stars stood for "bonks" instead of wounds. Animals were not slaughtered but rather escorted to a nearby wildlife refuge. <br /><br />After the painstaking assemblage of our teams the dice started flying and chaos ensued. I had a lot of lucky rolls early and broke out to a dominating lead. The dice showed no love for Chris, however, and finally when her elder daughter offered to roll her dice for her I urged her to consent. Sure enough, the little girl threw some smoking-hot dice, and many bold combatants were "captured" at her hands.<br /><br />Because of my auspicious head start my teams were often assailed by the other gladiators, and I was the first or second player to have all of my men wiped off the board. Undaunted, I assumed control of a ravenous, blood-mad bear and set upon my enemies like a polock gamer on a hot dog. After the dust and fur had settled one person was left standing (I forget who, actually), but I—yes, I, Joe Gola—was the victor. Mark made some bitter remark about my skills at rolling dice...I don't remember precisely what he said, but it was exactly the type of snippy comment one would expect from someone who had just been mauled by a bear. <br /><br />The game is a strange one, as there is an odd mixture of calculation and chaos; a fair amount of thought can be applied to one's setup, but that means little in the face of extraordinarily good or extraordinarily bad dice rolls. Early on in our game Chris whiffed against me and on the return fire I gave her a nasty pasting, and I actually felt quite bad about it; it was just a case of unusually bad luck on her part. Even so, I rather like the <i>Clash of the Gladiators</i>. If nothing else it's a short alternative to <i>Risk</i>.<br /><br />As always, I have to mention my goofy little statistics articles that I posted to boardgamegeek.com: <br /><br /><a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/144814">How Useful are Spear Holders?</a> <br /><a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/144952">How Worthwhile are Prong Bearers?</a><br /><a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/145161">How Valuable are Shield Carriers?</a><br /><a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/155547">What's the Deal with Net Casters?</a><br /><br />For our next game we played one of Matt's favorites, the card game <i>Split</i>, which is a clever rummy-like game in which each card depicts one half of a playing card and the idea is to match up the halves. There are three types of match, perfect, strong (different suit but same color) and weak (different suit, different color), and each type of match gives the player a bonus action (take a card, assign a penalty point, and trade a match, respectively). <br /><br />I made one very unpopular move early in the game, which was to leave a perfectly matched pair of cards on the discard pile for Mark to take, and the rest of the table pummeled me with penalty points for the rest of the round. Despite this and the fact that I was getting a little confused from all the beer that Eric was pouring me, I finished in the middle of the pack and beat Mark. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-lW0FP-Hc-aU2Q5gEf5MGS595IK_Z4xUYZQ8cnps2ZAtJuSxAmnBvPqz-jbLcS7Ub7de_1Hn8xB9GC0GQR_Mw9lpYkzKeX1SsZC6AMXVIo3OE6DMvIjLfpjOO7xsIJZNs_9FIKxBjOY0/s1600-h/Pandemic_cover.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-lW0FP-Hc-aU2Q5gEf5MGS595IK_Z4xUYZQ8cnps2ZAtJuSxAmnBvPqz-jbLcS7Ub7de_1Hn8xB9GC0GQR_Mw9lpYkzKeX1SsZC6AMXVIo3OE6DMvIjLfpjOO7xsIJZNs_9FIKxBjOY0/s400/Pandemic_cover.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5229202316428877762" /></a>The final game of the night was <i>Pandemic</i>, a cooperative game in which the players must work together to save the world from four superviruses which threaten humanity. I was the Researcher; my ability was to give away cards to facilitate the curing of disease. Mark was the Operations Expert; his specialty was establishing research stations. Eric was the Medic, who could heal an entire city with one wave of his stethoscope. Chris was the Dispatcher, and she was able to jet the other players around the globe as necessary. <br /><br />The early threat was from Asia, and we all headed over there to prevent an outbreak. We were able to cure and then eradicate the yellow disease (that's not a crack about Asia, it's just the color of the cube), and we were a turn away from curing at least one more, but we had a chain reaction outbreak in Northern Europe and the human race was destroyed, or at least severely inconvenienced.<br /><br />Ordinarily I am not enthusiastic about cooperative games, as I really enjoy the fun of the competitive element of gaming, but this was a good group for this particular endeavor, as everyone was chiming in with ideas on how to cope with the situation and no one was dominating the situation. I always find the group dynamics an interesting part of this hobby—I've often thought that you can learn a huge amount about a person by playing a game with him, much more than you would likely learn from an ordinary conversation in the same amount of time—and it was neat to experience the sense of give and take that the game facilitated in the group. Of course it doesn't hurt that they're all extremely nice people, even if some of them get pissy after bear attacks.Joe Golahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07660986477477676629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8242318521539377865.post-42698767529772277762008-06-13T11:12:00.000-04:002008-06-13T11:45:18.259-04:00How to Drive Yourself Crazy in One Easy LessonAll is quiet here at <i>Skunked Again</i> because I didn't make it out to any gaming events last weekend and I likely won't be able to make it to any this weekend or next. I was poised to go out the door Sunday evening but there were threats of severe thunderstorms, and that plus the fact that I had had a poor night's sleep prompted me to stay home and take it easy. <br /><br />Regardless, not being able to go gaming doesn't stop me from <i>thinking</i> about gaming, and in the long stretches between outings the topic that always brings the most agony and entertainment is "what should I bring to the next game night?" <br /><br />I have two theories about etiquette, in case you care. The first is that I try to limit myself to one game, or at most one game plus a short card game. In my circles people are fairly intense about what they want to play; everyone has particular games they're excited about, not to mention their backlogs of games they've bought and haven't played yet, and so there are always stacks of games everywhere that people are anxious to get to the table. If eight people bring four or five games to a game night (on top of the hundred-odd games that the host owns), you're talking about quite a few cardboard boxes that are supposed to hit the table in only four or five hours' time. I feel that by bringing one game it sends the message that I've shown some self-restraint, channeled all my enthusiasm into one pick, and otherwise am ready to accommodate other people. <br /><br />My other theory about etiquette is that if you're going to suggest a game, you should know the rules and be ready to teach with only a few glances at the rulebook for clarification. I find it aggravating when a person promotes one game to play over all the other ones handy and then makes everyone wait while he sits down and reads the rules. <br /><br />Anyway, the inner dialectic that I am always faced with when picking a game for game night is, do I try to check something off my "to do" list or do I go from the gut? Now, depending on whether the reader is a non-gamer or a die-hard gamer, the idea of a "to do" list for game night will either sound ridiculous or all too familiar. The top of the to-do list are games and expansions that I own that I've never played, after which comes the games that I own that I've only tried once. Also on the list are games that I really enjoyed but for some reason set aside too soon to try out newer acquisitions (I have since slowed down the pace of my game acquisitions, by the way). <br /><br />Being obsessive and a compulsive list-maker, I genuinely derive satisfaction from checking items off the list. It's <i>progress</i>, dammit! Also, I have this strange notion that when I clear away all these pesky unplayed games, I will no longer be encumbered by <b>stuff</b> and a golden halo of clarity will descend upon me. Even better, when I afterwards get the urge to buy a new game, I'll be able to do so 100% guilt free!<br /><br />Of course, I could just throw away the list and just do whatever I feel like, and that is the other contentious train of thought running through my head. Why suffer self-imposed restraints? Who cares if I have unplayed games? It's just stuff, and you are only unencumbered when you <i>choose</i> to be unencumbered! "Let go, Luke!"<br /><br />But, darn it, I paid for them, and I wanted to play them when I bought them!<br /><br />And on it goes. <br /><br />What makes the allure of checking stuff off the list so very strong these days is that I am actually within striking distance of achieving my goal of having no unplayed games in my collection. For the first time in years, I am down to only four titles. A mere five hours of playing time! Halo of clarity, here I come!<br /><br />And yet for some unknown reason I have a perverse desire to chuck it all and just play <a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/3242">Clash of the Gladiators</a>. More on that later, perhaps.Joe Golahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07660986477477676629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8242318521539377865.post-42972761043300330282008-06-05T15:53:00.000-04:002008-06-06T11:03:00.604-04:00Forty-Four No More (Wilton Gaming #5)I had another enjoyable night's gaming at Matt L's Tuesday night group. Present were Matt and his wife Andrea, Mark Delano, Alan Stern and Josh. <br /><br />We started off with a six-player game of <span style="font-style:italic;">Liar's Dice</span>. Each player has a cup of five dice which they roll in secret. The dice are special in that instead of ones they have a star, and the stars are wild. Players then take turns guessing at what is under all the cups, for example "five fours" or "six sixes." Each guess must be higher than the last, either in terms of the pips ("five fives" is higher than "five fours") or the dice ("six twos" is higher than "five sixes"). Players can also make a guess as to the number of stars, though these guesses follow slightly different rules which aren't worth going into here. Instead of making a guess, however, a player can call the last guess, and all players reveal their dice. If the guess was correct, the caller loses one or more of his own dice; if the guess was incorrect, the player who made that guess loses dice. The last person left with dice is the winner.<br /><br />There were a lot of laughs involved as the predictions would get more and more outlandish until finally someone would call and everyone would get to see how far off they were. Josh and Alan were the first two to get knocked out, followed by Matt and then Andrea (the latter bamboozled by my uncanny ability to roll twos), leaving just Mark Delano and I. We rolled. I had a six. Mark's prediction was "one three." I knew I had him beat. "One six," I said. He countered with "one star." Bullshit! I called. He showed a star. He had faked me out. Crap!<br /><br />At that point we split into two groups. Josh, Matt and Mark played <span style="font-style:italic;">Glory to Rome</span> and Alan, Andrea and I played <span style="font-style:italic;">Palazzo</span>.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbL8RTG8IJWaEAiAHaCK8kQNQtxIEcrUUi7-8aYZqiYBEO8b0uA2FP09tX_NZIRyIddLkFCTrmYzUA-SAD0oWNXzjG72hWEa03n-fLK9VzM7tcIh_8lQHKFSwaXlZuwRxuZY_H6Ng2nyE/s1600-h/Game_149_imageBoxCover.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbL8RTG8IJWaEAiAHaCK8kQNQtxIEcrUUi7-8aYZqiYBEO8b0uA2FP09tX_NZIRyIddLkFCTrmYzUA-SAD0oWNXzjG72hWEa03n-fLK9VzM7tcIh_8lQHKFSwaXlZuwRxuZY_H6Ng2nyE/s400/Game_149_imageBoxCover.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5208489158330494658" /></a>Andrea proved to be a <span style="font-style:italic;">Palazzo</span> whiz once again. She ended the game with three palazzos of four stories, two of which were all made of one building material; I think she had an additional three-story building as well. I also had three palazzos of four stories, but only one of mine was so aesthetically pleasing, and so I had three bonus points less than Andrea. She had also snagged more valuable tiles in general (more doors and windows). Alan had put together an impressive five-story palazzo all made of sandstone for twelve bonus points, but I think his other two buildings may have only been three stories each. Andrea finished with forty-four points; I think my score was somewhere around thirty-six. I can't recall Alan's score or whether he finished second or last.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Palazzo</span> is an interesting game that gives the players lots to think about, but one thing I've noticed is that it's rather a chore to teach. Everything is quite involved; there are three currencies plus wild combos, the tiles come out onto the table in a relatively complex way, every auction starts at three, there's a variable game end, there's a special case rule for when there are four or more tiles in a quarry, et cetera. Certainly it's no <i>Squad Leader</i>, but even so it's a bit too complicated considering it's just a forty-five minute game with a fair amount of luck involved. <br /><br />I don't know the full story behind the game, but I suspect that the publisher/developer, "Alea," may have had a hand in the over-involved rules, as the creator of the game—the great Reiner Knizia—usually designs very elegant and streamlined games. The publisher,* on the other hand, definitely tends towards convoluted rule sets; for example, they have one particular game which I really enjoy but which I have all but given up on because I cringe at the thought of having to go through the rules again. However, when they do manage to keep things from getting too byzantine, they put out some fantastic stuff; I own twelve of their twenty games and three of those are among my absolute favorites. <br /><br />The longer I've been in the hobby, the more I've come to appreciate games that get a lot of interesting play out of simple rule sets. This is partly because of the fact that I play a huge variety of games with a huge variety of people, and so almost every game is a learning game for <i>someone</i>. Being able to just sit down and play without a rules explanation is very rare. <br /><br />The other table had not yet finished their game of <span style="font-style:italic;">Glory to Rome</span>, so I enticed Alan and Andrea into a game of <span style="font-style:italic;">Great Wall of China</span>, also designed by Reiner Knizia. By contrast, <span style="font-style:italic;">Great Wall of China</span> is an example of a game in which the weight of the rulebook is in sync with how long and luck-heavy the game is; if anything, I'd say the game is ahead of the curve in that it packs rather a lot of gameplay into a relatively few rules. <br /><br />Even so, the game play is a little tricky to explain succinctly, but I'll give it a shot. Before the players on the table are pairs of randomly-drawn victory tokens ranging in value between 1 and 8. Meanwhile, players each have decks of influence cards, some of which are merely numbered and others of which also have special powers. On their turn players have two actions, and for each action their choice is to either draw a card from their deck into their hand or to play a card or multiple matching cards next to one of the pairs of victory tokens. When a player begins his turn with a sole majority of influence against any pair, he claims one of the tokens and puts it on his cards; this acts negatively towards his total; the remaining token is up for grabs in the same way, and when the second token is claimed the tokens are taken by those who have claimed them, the cards are cleared, and two new tokens are put in their place. <br /><br />There are two interesting things going on here. The first is that players must continually make the choice between drawing and playing cards; unlike other card games, you don't get to draw cards on your turn for free! The other is that you can play multiples of a particular type of card in one action; this means that the bigger your hand is, the more power you have. The catch is that if you spend too much time drawing cards your opponents may be able to win tokens cheaply. <br /><br />In our game Alan and I ended up tussling with each other like two dogs over a bone and Andrea was able to scoop up lots of points with little hassle from the boys. She won the game, once again with <span style="font-style:italic;">forty-four points</span>. What the hell? I finished with a respectable forty-one, and Alan ended the game with twenty-five. <br /><br />Everyone enjoyed the game, I think. We were all constantly butting heads with each other and there were plenty of big plays and "gotcha" moments, all of which translate to fun gameplay. I'm keen to try it again soon to see how much depth there is to it. I imagine that a player could do well by paying attention to how many cards his opponents have and which ones they had played, and also by keeping note of how many fronts his opponents are fighting on and how overextended they are, but on the other hand a vindictive opponent and the usual unpredictability of card draws could conceivably undercut any amount of brainwork.<br /><br />We'll see.<br /><br />________________________<br /><br />* Co-publisher, I should probably say, since the publisher in the U.S. is Rio Grande Games. In this case, however, I think that most of the actual work on the game is done by Alea, whereas Rio Grande merely translates the rules and prints the English edition.Joe Golahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07660986477477676629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8242318521539377865.post-43814281412168289182008-05-20T12:21:00.000-04:002008-05-20T12:52:11.568-04:00Perfect-information Games for More than TwoIn the course of discussing <i>Tzaar</i> a couple of weeks ago I parenthetically mentioned that there are games which have no random element but which I do not necessarily consider "pure strategy games" because of the fact that they are designed for more than two players. Ordinarily I am not a big fan of this type of game, but not because it fails to be purely strategic, but rather because of two problems that almost always seem to crop up. The first problem is that the games tend to be a bit slow because competitive players will want to examine every possible option. This happens in two-player perfect-information games as well, of course, but since there is only one opponent there is usually not too much down time overall. Multiply the thinking time by three opponents, however, and a person can find himself with rather a lot of time to kill. The thinking required can also be more involved than that in a two-player game, since players have to take into account the goals of more than one opponent and then consider the potential reaction to the potential reaction to their move. <br /><br />Contrast this to a game that has randomness or hidden goals; in this case players will often settle on a move fairly quickly, even in a complex game, because after a certain point the law of diminishing returns will kick in. If I don't have all the information, I can only make a guess about the best move, and calculating every possible chain of cause and effect might be a waste of time. Really it's more of a psychological issue than a logical one, however; in the case where a situation has uncertainty, we feel that fate is a part of the process and ultimately we submit to her, whereas in the case that all the information is available to us, to make a suboptimal move is <span style="font-style:italic;">our failure</span>, even if discovering the optimal move will take an extraordinary amount of time and effort, even if the time required to discover the optimal move is contrary to the point of the activity, which is not to win but to have an enjoyable social experience. <br /><br />The second problem with this type of game is that very competitive people can easily get bent out of shape if they feel that one of their opponents made a poor move which upset the balance of power. This can happen in any game, to be sure, but it is less of an issue when there is information hidden from opponents. How can you say I made a bad move unless you know exactly what I have to work with? Regardless, this sort of thing has soured more than one gaming experience for me, and in the end I would rather just avoid particular games than to have to listen to whining. <br /><br />It happened that this past weekend I played two games that more or less fit the description of "perfect-information games for more than two," namely <i>Recess</i> and <i>Shear Panic</i>. The former has no hidden or random element whatsoever, but <i>Shear Panic</i> does have some dice that come into play in a minor way. I ended up enjoying <i>Recess</i> the more out of the two, despite the fact that it is the game that ought to be more prone to the two issues just mentioned. Why is that? <br /><br />The reason, I think, has to do with the different kinds of turns that the players have in the different games. In <i>Recess</i> the turns are simple in terms of how each move contributes to your overall progress. You are moving pawns to either achieve a short-term goal (jumping one of your opponents' schoochildren and beating the milk money out of them, tattling on another child, et cetera) or to make quantifiable progress towards a long-term goal (bringing one of your boys and one of your girls together for a smooch). <i>Shear Panic</i> is different in that you are confronted with many different kinds of move, and each can be applied to the situation in different ways. There is an arrangement of sheep, and players have a menu of manipulations that they can apply to the entire flock, which includes both their own pieces and those of the other players. That in itself is more complicated, and what is worse is that players do not always have the guiding light of a short-term goal to direct them. The future is often quite nebulous, and this is when a player will start looking at the other players' tools and goals to see how they might monkey with the state of things. "Is it worthwhile to move my piece to the front of the line if the next guy can change which side of the herd is the front?" The decision-making process in <i>Recess</i> is also easier because there is less ability for other players to disturb your pieces than in <i>Shear Panic</i>, so you're not starting every turn from scratch. <br /><br />The king of this type of game, as far as I am concerned, is <i>Through the Desert</i>. Here there is no random or hidden element of any kind, players are simply placing two pieces onto the board, and once placed they can never be moved. The pieces form chains which stretch out in various directions to acquire territory and thus points. What makes this more appealing to me? Again, it is because players' moves are simple and incremental and because the state of the board does not change wildly. Players do have to worry about what their opponents are up to, but the game takes away the complication of <i>how</i> they are going to interfere, so the players are left with an experience which you could say is purely about intention and prioritizing. Contrast this to <i>Shear Panic</i>, in which it is the players' intentions which have been simplified and it is instead the various means to the single end which hold all the complexity. I would assert that the simple-ends-complicated-means model can be very enjoyable in solitaire activities such as puzzles or computer games, but when one has the luxury of human opponents with all their personality and psychology and unpredictability, the games which focus on the goals work better than those which focus on process.Joe Golahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07660986477477676629noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8242318521539377865.post-51115099804402611002008-05-13T09:51:00.000-04:002008-05-14T14:12:59.810-04:00The Mother of All Board Gaming EventsConnecticut gaming kingpin Mark Casiglio organized an all-day game day on Saturday, widely advertised and open to all comers. It was held in a large meeting room at a church in Shelton, Connecticut. Mark toted over a good portion of his game library, provided lots of drinks and snacks, and charged no admission. Is this guy crazy or what?<br /><br />I arrived at about 2:00 and there were already a few games underway; one table had a four-player game of Through the Ages going which continued on for about six hours (unless they played two and never got up between games). A bunch of other people were looking for a game, and if I were a completely selfless person I would have suggested something for everyone to play, but I was too eager to try out <i>Tzaar</i>, the game I mentioned in a post last week. I suggested it and a nice guy named Mark took me up on the offer.*<br /><br />We played two games, each of us going first once. Mark turned out to be pretty damn cagey; he beat me in the first game by whittling down my Tzarras and then setting up a fairly convoluted but devastatingly effective attack against my last Tzarra piece. The second game went a little longer; and we were both under heavy pressure at various points; in particular Mark had constructed a three-stack piece which was very menacing, but I had a hunch that I could get him to run out of captures first. He didn't see the danger and eventually I abandoned most of his pieces to one side of the board except for a little herd which I was able to harvest at leisure.<br /><br />The game was a joy to play. Through the haze of inexperience I began to perceive vague regions of strength and peril on the board, that intuitive element that I enjoy so much in this type of game. The push and pull of the two different victory conditions was also fun and interesting. I felt like could have played five more matches right there and then, but there were a lot of people around and it didn't make sense to keep on playing a two-player game.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1NE0LZfdJMjpBfsjJHQopAIHaPfafTXcL7goNg2Do_6ahBDJfR0Xc7Mhk1vv90ukVBdZzovwCmCJDYKB7tq1UAefCk9kSz1J9Cn5-S9ZgD806is8npADJAsdrDfzRcCXqExy0acdSLVs/s1600-h/Game_249_imageBoxCover.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1NE0LZfdJMjpBfsjJHQopAIHaPfafTXcL7goNg2Do_6ahBDJfR0Xc7Mhk1vv90ukVBdZzovwCmCJDYKB7tq1UAefCk9kSz1J9Cn5-S9ZgD806is8npADJAsdrDfzRcCXqExy0acdSLVs/s400/Game_249_imageBoxCover.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5200297559849153410" border="0" /></a>Afterwards I ended up chatting with Alan Stern, Don Sutherland and Matt Daigle (organizer of the upcoming <a href="http://www.connecticon.com/">Connecticon</a>), and we agreed to give Don's copy of <i>Airships</i> a spin. <i>Airships</i> is a new dice game from Queen Games and Rio Grande Games. It is a bit more involved than yacht or liar's dice, but still fairly simple and accessible. The goal is to score points by rolling certain totals on certain combinations of dice, the targets mostly being dictated by a deck of cards. There are three white dice which have the numbers 1, 1, 2, 2, 3 and 3 on the faces, three red dice which have 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, and 5, and three black dice which have 4, 4, 6, 6, 8 and 8. However, players only start out with the ability to roll a very limited number of dice and so they must first upgrade their rolling power by earning cards. These cards are also earned by rolling totals on dice, so the players roll dice to earn increasingly more powerful cards until they can gradually work their way up to being able roll dice to earn points.<br /><br />The game was breezy and fun, though there are definitely some interesting decisions to make. Chiefest among those is deciding when to stop upgrading one's dice-rolling abilities and instead focus on earning points. I ended up winning the game, simply because the rest of the table went on too long trying to improve their dice mojo. They were ultimately able to win some big prizes but I had taken too many little prizes and the game ended before anyone could seriously threaten my lead.<br /><br />Two more folks had become free at this point, and rather than try and figure out a six-player game we opted for two groups of three. Alan, Matt and I chose <i>Saint Petersburg</i>. I had played this one a few times before face-to-face plus a lot of games on the computer. Matt was also an old hand at the game, but it was Alan's first try.<br /><br /><i>Saint Petersburg</i> is actually somewhat similar to <i>Airships</i> in that you start off the game trying to build up your power base but must eventually switch over to trying to earn victory points. There are no dice in the game, however; instead it is simply a question of earning and spending money. The game is fun to play, though perhaps a hair on the dry side. In particular I love the setting and artwork, and all of the cards have some little detail highlighted in gold foil, which is a nice touch.<br /><br />Now, ordinarily I like to play games with the rules as written and avoid house rules and variants, but in this case there is a common house rule that I am in favor of. There is a particular card, the "Mistress of Ceremonies," which, if it is bought on the first round, is a little bit too powerful; the house rule is that if it comes up in the first round you shuffle it back into the deck and replace it. In our game the card did indeed come out in the first round, and I had first crack at it. I asked Matt if he wanted to shuffle it back in, but judging from his reaction I would guess that he is even more averse to house rules than I. "You sure?" Yep, he was. Not being a fool, I took it. Add to that the fact that I got an Observatory on the next turn and you can probably guess who won. Amusingly enough, using the Observatory in the second round I got the <i>second</i> Mistress of Ceremonies, though of course I didn't have the cash to actually use it until a few rounds later.<br /><br />The other thing that was strange was that no one was able to collect a large number of nobles; the game went quickly and we pulled a lot of duplicates. I think Alan had the most with five different nobles, whereas I ended the game with only four different ones.<br /><br />As I said, I enjoy <i>Saint Petersburg</i>. I wouldn't put it among my favorite games only because it tends to be a little samey from game to game; the details might differ, but you're basically trying to hit the same marks every time. On the other hand, this sameness makes it very easy to slip back into a comfortable groove.<br /><br />Some games looked to be breaking up at this point so we decided to play something quick until it was time to shuffle the gamers into new hands. Matt picked <i>No Thanks</i> and we were joined by Pat McKeon and Adam Skinner. <i>No Thanks</i> is an incredibly simple game but still rather fun. There is a deck of cards numbered from 1 to about 35 or 40, and each player also has a supply of "no thanks" chips. The goal of the game is to finish with the lowest score. One player will turn over a card and players must choose between saying "no thanks" and placing a chip on it or accepting the card and taking any chips that have already been placed on it. If you have no chips left you are forced to take the card. Cards are worth their face value in points, while chips are worth -1. What makes the game interesting is that if you have a run of cards (i.e, 19, 20, 21), only the lowest card in the run counts against you.<br /><br />I must confess that I did not do very well at the game. I let my supply of chips get too low and I ended up having to take a bunch of stuff which was, shall we say, "not conducive to a winning score." Adam won with only a smattering of points. Very likely I came in last.<br /><br />Afterwards Pat, Matt, Adam and Alan started up a game of <i>Key Harvest</i> and I joined Mark Delano, Don Sutherland and Lisa in a game of <i>Galaxy Trucker</i>, a game which I had not played before and which is quite popular at the moment.<br /><br />The concept of <i>Galaxy Trucker</i> is pretty clever. In the first half of the game, players must build a spaceship from a pile of face-down tiles in the center of the table. This is a bit tricky because there are various restrictions (lasers must face outwards, rockets must face the rear, et cetera), there are three different types of connector, and, most importantly, <i>you have to do all this before a timer runs out</i>. When the time is up, the players must send their spaceships out into the void and race to planets where they can pick up important interstellar cargo for sale back home. Of course, there are a few hazards involved with space travel as well. After all, this isn't some quiet, peaceful <i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i>-type outer space. There are meteor showers, there are space pirates, there are random laser blasts from unspecified sources, and if any of these hazardous elements get through the defenses of your hastily built and barely space-legal ship, chunks sometimes go flying off and get left behind. If you have to ask why THX-1138 isn't at his post, chances are he had a brief encounter with an asteroid and is spinning off towards towards the galactic rim at 900 miles an hour.<br /><br />Sound fun? Well, many people certainly think so, but I have to admit that I found myself a bit flummoxed, perhaps even discombobulated. The game is fairly involved, and all the necessary brainwork gave me a craving for something strategic when really the game is more of a smash-up derby. I'm sure I'd get better at it with experience, but I'm not sure that that would entirely eradicate the little bit of frustration I felt with the game.<br /><br />Of course, you'll have to take all this with a grain of salt because I fared quite miserably. My ships made it through their trials okay—a little bashed apart but mostly intact—but I did not earn very many points. I came in dead last with a score in the thirties. I forget who won, but I think their score was more in the neighborhood of eighty.<br /><br />It was getting on towards seven or eight o'clock, so I had one more game left in me before it was time to go home. We were joined by Luz, who I had not met before, and we settled on the old Alea game <i>Chinatown</i>, which I had always wanted to try.** <i>Chinatown</i> has an interesting history in that it was the third game released by a then-new publisher, Alea, but it ended up being not terribly popular and so began to sink into obscurity. Not long after, however, Alea came out with a string of hits, most notably <i>The Princes of Florence</i> and <i>Puerto Rico</i>; gamers also finally warmed up to two early releases which initially had been received with a mixed reaction, namely <i>Ra</i> and <i>Taj Mahal</i> (which incidentally are two of my favorite games). So, all things Alea became very popular, and many board game aficionados began to want to collect their entire catalogue to impress their friends and scorn their enemies (especially because the Alea games were always very nice productions and were <b>numbered</b>, a quality which is for some reason irresistible to collectors). The only catch was that by this time <i>Chinatown</i> had gone out of print and copies were hard to find. At their peak copies still in shrink wrap were fetching over $100, though the demand is easing now that the game is being reprinted, albeit by a different company.<br /><br />Amazingly, Mark Delano had purchased a copy of the game back when it was originally published, though he had never punched out the pieces or opened the plastic wrap on the cards because he had always played the game using other people's copies. We were playing with a virgin copy that had only had one owner. Golly!<br /><br />Anyway, <i>Chinatown</i> is essentially a game of wheeling and dealing. It has one resemblance to <i>Monopoly</i> in that players are trying to put together collections of matching properties on a board, but the similarities end there. There are no pawns that travel around and you don't have to pay other players rent. Essentially players receive random lots and random businesses to put on the lots; if you can put down a contiguous collection of identical businesses on the board, you'll earn money, but this is almost impossible to do without trading lots and businesses with the other players.<br /><br />I was able to complete one small set and one medium-sized set of businesses in the first half, but I didn't have any decent prospects after that. For the rest of the game I spent my time bargaining for straight cash with the other players. My biggest deal was with Lisa; I sold her two businesses for $12,000 and two other businesses. Had she been able to immediately turn around and complete the set this would have been a decent deal for her, because she would have paid out $12,000 but earned $42,000. It was not to be, however; she couldn't come to terms with Mark, who held the final business that she needed. It was a calculated risk on my part and it paid off.<br /><br />In the end I won with $111,000. Don came in second with $101,000. <i>Chinatown</i> ended up being my favorite of the games played besides <i>Tzaar</i>. Really, the only game that I wasn't that keen on was <i>Galaxy Trucker</i>, but the company was good, and that is what is important. Thanks to everyone who sat across the table from me, because I had a really good time. My only disappointment is that I never got around to playing anything with the Paradis family, the Shea family, Joe Lee, Keith Corbino or the often hilarious Dustin Gervais and Rich W.<br /><br />_________________<br /><br />* At large game gatherings like this one has to strike a difficult balance between selfishness and generosity when it comes to picking games. On the one hand I want everyone to have a good time and be included, but on the other hand if you never speak up and make your preferences known you sometimes end up spending the day playing extremely light or bland games with large groups and feeling like you've wasted your precious gaming time. For this reason I usually set aside one game in my mind that I will push to get to the table and otherwise try to be as agreeable and inclusive as I can.<br /><br />** And, coincidentally, I had re-watched the film of the same name the day before.<br /><br /><br />Airships <span style="font-style:italic;">game box photo courtesy of Rio Grande Games</span>Joe Golahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07660986477477676629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8242318521539377865.post-33643148772623539602008-05-09T10:34:00.000-04:002008-05-09T18:00:57.823-04:00"Pure Strategy"<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiRHuVKcsxFdvypvvLBAP7Cob5XTUT32j54S7EVJHfm8RR_BshHwU8QfOlhH2d__yqDRcGmOjVL8NAbge6elPHlXO2Giij-V51uXdv41GKY_GtzRtsTWQCBj8-Z2mtmQAm9HAEOpn-a8U/s1600-h/TZAAR_logo_smal.gif"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiRHuVKcsxFdvypvvLBAP7Cob5XTUT32j54S7EVJHfm8RR_BshHwU8QfOlhH2d__yqDRcGmOjVL8NAbge6elPHlXO2Giij-V51uXdv41GKY_GtzRtsTWQCBj8-Z2mtmQAm9HAEOpn-a8U/s400/TZAAR_logo_smal.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5198387796307897346" border="0" /></a>I'm excited because I got a new game this week, namely <i>Tzaar</i>, designed by the Belgian Kris Burm. Gamers always refer to this type of game as "two-player abstract," though this is misleading because it suggests that one of the primary distinguishing qualities of the type is that the games do not make any pretense of being analogues of real-world situations in the way that Monopoly is "about" real estate. It may well be true that most of the games that fall under this umbrella aren't "about" anything other than themselves, but what gamers are really thinking of when they talk about two-player abstracts are games which are 100% skill-based—in other words, games in which there is no random element. For example, checkers is a two-player abstract while gin rummy is not.* By contrast, the game <a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/178"><span style="font-style: italic;">Mole Hill</span></a> does have a real-world setting, fanciful though it might be, but most gamers would still consider it as being a two-player abstract (and indeed someone has classified it as such on the massive gaming database <a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/">boardgamegeek.com</a>).<br /><br /><i>Tzaar</i> bills itself as a "pure strategy game," and I think this is more apt a description than "two-player abstract," though I will probably go on using the terms interchangeably from force of habit.<br /><br /><i>Tzaar</i> is a chess-like game in which pieces capture other pieces. The moves are less restricted than they are in chess, but a piece cannot stop on an empty space; pieces instead move along one of the lines radiating from its intersection to capture another piece, just so long as the capturing piece is at least as strong as the piece that is captured. "Piece" in this context refers to both a single piece and a stack of pieces, and strength is measured in terms of the height of the stack, with a single piece having a height and strength of one. Each player has three types of piece, and some are scarcer than others; if any single type of a player's pieces is eliminated from the board that player loses.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXsorpGyJjGPiaaD1kjLTPTzm3RH32VSykJmSWXEqsOfCc4E4U3Ailu2Q26BLgTcNS6XtQfqYzRnQzNZflb1GO73jA9hRE3prPGlUlco5ukJT5TSQuNbjWK_blYF_4ZxDjA-lQjYrw5vY/s1600-h/tzaar_game.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXsorpGyJjGPiaaD1kjLTPTzm3RH32VSykJmSWXEqsOfCc4E4U3Ailu2Q26BLgTcNS6XtQfqYzRnQzNZflb1GO73jA9hRE3prPGlUlco5ukJT5TSQuNbjWK_blYF_4ZxDjA-lQjYrw5vY/s400/tzaar_game.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5198387989581425682" border="0" /></a>What makes the game interesting is that a player can forgo capturing an opponent's piece to instead jump on one of his own pieces to create a stack and thus a more powerful piece. He can also increase the height of an existing stack. The down side is that instead of reducing his opponent's pool of pieces by one he has reduced his own pool of pieces by one; this is a problem because a player will also lose if he is unable to make a capture.<br /><br />The result is a game which has an almost philosophical element to it; players must adopt an approach and make choices between options which are qualitatively different but both good in their own way. This is a very common feature of the "German" style of family board games that has been popular since the mid-1990s, but it is not necessarily something which is seen very often in pure strategy games outside of choices between opening moves. Certainly there are sacrifices in chess, where a player will willingly give up a piece in order to gain a better overall board position, but this is only done with a very specific aim in mind, whereas in <i>Tzaar</i> a player might choose choose to create stacks simply because the play style appeals to him or to explore a strategical approach.<br /><br />I love well-designed pure strategy games. There is a wonderful sense of exploration about them, and the sense of psychic connection that one gets with a well-matched opponent is something unlike any other gaming experience. There are often odd, half-silent conversations that go on during play, as a player will shrug or chuckle or curse with a move and the other player will know exactly what his opponent is referring to. Despite the supposed dryness and abstraction, players' personalities are on center stage, and they often show through the moves as clearly as if they were painted on the pieces.<br /><br />The difficulty is that many people are just not suited to this type of game. For many people in the hobby the setting of the game is the most important element; if the story takes place in ancient Rome or in the age of the rail barons or in deepest outer space the imagination kicks in and conjures up associations that tickle their fancy. In this case the point of playing is to live out history, enjoy a role, or simply to reconnect with the daydreams of adolescence.<br /><br />Beyond that there are pitfalls even for those who enjoy the abstract mechanisms of a game more than the window dressing. The problem is that a player can perceive his ego or self-worth being at stake when the game is a pure test of wits, and so not only an intense sense of competition arises but sometimes also a paralyzing fear of making a mistake and a compulsion to leave no stone unturned in searching for the best move. The result is a game that takes hours to play because one player (or, God forbid, both) will be approaching it like a puzzle which is solvable given a sufficient amount of effort.<br /><br />Chess solves this problem by adding a clock to the game which forces players to keep things moving, but this solution can be awkward or potentially insulting to suggest when playing a casual game with friends. It is better, I think, to try to find opponents who have an instinctual sense of the social contract of this type of game and who understand that the game is not really about the winning but about the playing, just as a journey is often more meaningful than the destination. To me a good player is a player who can make good moves in a reasonable amount of time; a player who wins a lot of games but takes five minutes per turn is just a good robot.<br /><br />Anyway, I will hopefully be able to play a game of <i>Tzaar</i> or two tomorrow at "The Mother of All Board Game Events" being held in Shelton Connecticut. If so, I will report back with my findings. At some point I shall also have to write up a little something about the larger game concept of which <i>Tzaar</i> is only a part—that is, terrifying and majestic <b>Gipf Project</b>. Stay tuned.<br /><br />__________<br /><br />* It's worth mentioning that there are a few games which lie in a gray area; some people might consider games like <span style="font-style: italic;">Stratego</span> or <a href="http://www.plateaugame.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Plateau</span></a> two-player abstracts because strictly speaking there is no randomness, but there is hidden information which introduces an element of luck. Another question that arises is whether a game which can be played by more than two players is "pure strategy" if there is no random or hidden element. Perhaps this is snobbish of me, but I am inclined to say no; player A might win not because he is the best player but because player B is a poor player and did something unpredictable which helped player A or hurt player C.Joe Golahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07660986477477676629noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8242318521539377865.post-51456177727549775982008-05-08T14:38:00.000-04:002008-05-08T16:09:49.900-04:00Wilton Gaming #4I returned to Matt L.'s gaming group this past Tuesday night. Also present was Matt's wife Andrea, Mark Delano, Donna, Ilan, and Josh & Amanda. Mark and Donna I had met at previous Wilton gatherings, whereas Ilan, Josh and Amanda I was meeting for the first time.<br /><br />It's becoming a tradition at Matt's that on arrival we get a rundown of what stories Matt read to his children while putting them to bed. Last time it was Shel Silverstein, who Matt is vehemently opposed to for a number of reasons. I am in agreement that <i>The Giving Tree</i> is a very depressing book. This time it was some kind of alphabet book. "How did it end?" asked Ilan. "The zebra did it," I said. I was pretty proud of myself until I remembered that Steven Wright told that joke first. Probably Ilan was setting himself up for that same punch line.<br /><br />Josh & Amanda had yet to show up, and while we were waiting Donna requested the card game <span style="font-style: italic;">Guillotine</span>, which she had heard about but had never tried. The game is amusing insomuch as it is about beheading nobles during the French revolution and because some of the cards are quite funny, but in terms of game play it's a pretty random affair. We only got through one round before J & A showed up. Hopefully Donna got the gist.<br /><br />On a side note regarding the general weirdness of gamers (present company excepted), the last time I had played <span style="font-style: italic;">Guillotine </span>was a two-player game with a guy at "Alternate Boardgames" in Milford. He was very into the game and clearly knew it backwards and forwards, but, as I mentioned, it's entirely random so I ended up winning. He was actually rather despondent about it all and couldn't believe that he had lost "his own game." I was thinking that if he wanted to go to the trouble of learning a game backwards and forwards he'd be better off choosing one that had some little smattering of strategy involved.<br /><br />Anyway, Josh & Amanda arrived and someone suggested playing a quick game of <span style="font-style: italic;">Tsuro </span>before splitting up into two groups. <span style="font-style: italic;">Tsuro </span>is a simple board game consisting mostly of square cards on a grid. Each card has paths crisscrossing it and each player has a pawn that travels the paths. If your pawn is forced off the board or crashes into another pawn, you're out of the game. Sound simple? It is. The game is also notable because it can handle up to eight players quite well, which is something of a rarity. Anyway, at one point we had five pawns all heading into the same square, and there was indeed a massive kerplosion as two pawns collided. Did I mention the pawns are filled with dynamite? They certainly are. The deluxe edition comes with safety goggles. My pawn skirted the other little dudes but was sent off the board in shame. Unclean! In the end it was down to Ilan and Amanda, and I think Amanda had no choice but to play a card which sent her off the board.<br /><br />At that point we split into two groups. I had brought <span style="font-style: italic;">Palazzo</span>, and Matt suggested that we give it a go. Andrea and Donna joined. The other four went off to play the popular Pandemic, a cooperative game in which the players try to save the world from horrible diseases rampaging across the globe. They lost. Twice.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Palazzo</span>, on the other hand, is a game which is almost completely disease-free. The game centers around little rectangular tiles which each represent a floor of a Florentine palazzo. Players have money cards and they try to buy tiles and construct tiny flat houses for their imaginary two-dimensional Florentine friends. Players get points based on how esthetically pleasing their buildings are, which is to say that they get points for the number of windows and doors and bonuses for tall buildings and for having buildings made all of one material. However, buildings of only two floors are considered to be unworthy of the name 'palazzo' and are worth no points, whereas buildings of only one floor are such abject failures that you actually lose a few points for having one in front of you.<br /><br />The catch is that the floors are all numbered, and you're not allowed to put the second floor on top of the third, and so on. You are allowed to skip floors, however, even if this means that there's no first floor and the miniature Italians have no way to get into their homes except by climbing through the window like a common burglar.<br /><br />Sound simple? Well, it's not. Despite the fact that the game only lasts about an hour, it's actually fairly complicated, with lots of rules devoted to how the tiles come up and how you go about acquiring them. If you can make it through them, the game is a lot of fun, but I can see them being a turn-off to non-gamers.<br /><br />The other tricky thing about the game is that it's a little unusual in that money is not hard to come by but there is instead time pressure. Players can always choose to spend their turn taking more cash (and everyone else gets a little extra too whenever anyone does this), but there are only so many tiles to be had and you're generally not able to make up for buying nothing in the first half by buying twice as much in the second. This is particularly the case because the lower floors are loaded into the first half of the tile stacks, whereas later in the game the higher floors are predominant. I think this is a neat feature, but it can trip up the unwary.<br /><br />The unwary this game turned out to be Matt and Donna, even though both had played before. They both had a lot of cards in their hands but few tiles on the table; perhaps they were waiting for just the right tiles to come up, but this is a little risky in a four-player game. Andrea, however, was an enthusiastic shopper, and while she tended not to have a lot of money, she was able to put together some nice buildings. She probably would have won except that the game ended a little sooner than she expected. I was the winner with thirty-two points from one five-story building, one four-story building and one four-story building of all one color (if I remember correctly). Donna and Andrea both ended with twenty-four points and Matt told me to go to hell when I asked him about his score.<br /><br />I was a little tired at that point, but <span style="font-style: italic;">Amun-Re</span> was mentioned, and I could not resist the siren call. I probably should have went to bed instead. My opponents were Mark, Ilan and Matt.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Amun-Re</span> is a fairly involved game that takes place in ancient Egypt. Players farm the land, sacrifice to the Gods, and build pyramids as monuments to their own greater glory. The game is not difficult in the sense that you need to do a lot of computation or figure out all the possible moves and counter-moves, but there is a good deal of strategic thinking required. In fact, I think the game is remarkable in that it requires a lot of long-term strategy and yet it moves along quite breezily.<br /><br />The game is played out in two halves, and at the halfway mark I was in third place with twelve points (three pyramids, most pyramids in the West, two temples at 2 VP each). Trailing at this point is usually not a big deal, since the players who take the lead in points are often cash-poor for the second half, but I did not perceive myself as having a lot more money than the rest of the table. Instead I was kicking myself because I had been too stingy and could have had fifteen points instead of twelve if I had spent just a little more (don't ask how, it's too complicated).<br /><br />The second half was a bit of a struggle for me. I was aggressive in the first round and bought the most desirable province for fifteen gold, but afterwards I had to be a little more miserly and take whatever came my way. This was an okay strategy for me because I didn't have any VP-getting power cards anyway (these score you points depending on which combinations of provinces you end up possessing). In fact I never drew a single one throughout the game, which is pretty unusual.<br /><br />In the end I scored for having seven pyramids (7 VP), two triplets (3 VP each for 6 total), most pyramids in the West (5 VP) and most money (6 VP) for 24 points for the half and 36 total. Ilan came in first with 41 points and Mark was just ahead of me with 37. When I tried to see Matt's score he flicked his piece off the board and told me to go to hell.<br /><br />Ilan was careful to point out that I was the one who granted him the win, because I chose not to block him from tying me for most pyramids in the West, but the reality was that had I done so Mark would have instead come in first and I would still have finished in third. Also, at the time I felt that there was a chance that Ilan would not be able to tie me even if he had wanted to, as I thought he had less money than he really did.<br /><br />Regardless, I felt that I had at least passably acquitted myself considering that I was tired, I was rushing a little, and I never got any VP-scoring power cards.<br /><br />I would also like to point out that Ilan made a lot of terrible puns based on the names of the Egyptian provinces. If there were any justice in this world he would have taken penalty points for each one and I would have at least come in second.Joe Golahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07660986477477676629noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8242318521539377865.post-40551696750594274832008-05-08T14:36:00.001-04:002008-05-08T14:36:41.841-04:00IntroductionPeople sometimes ask me "why do you like playing cards so much?" I'm not sure how to answer that question so usually I just break off all contact.Joe Golahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07660986477477676629noreply@blogger.com1