Sunday, November 18, 2007

Nixon Wins in '60!

Laurent and I got a chance to try out 1960:The Making of the President on Saturday. Here's a very brief rundown of how the game went and an early review.

The early game saw a lot of competition for the Issues, as we thought that having Momentum would be a very useful thing, used as it is to trigger your opponent's events. In fact, I think this is not a bad strategy in some ways, at least as long as you are remembering that in the end all that matters is how the votes come out. I neglected to remember that Momentum evaporates a bit every turn, so there were multiple times where I ended up losing a momentum I perhaps did not need to.

I did well in the debates as Nixon, largely because I managed to play a card that crippled Laurent's CP plays but forgot that I lost all three single CP tokens before the debate. As it was, because we did not understand the debate process as well as we might have the cards that went into the Campaign Strategy pile were often suboptimal. This gave me a seven-to-two edge in State Support, which I suspect helped me win.

The rules are very vague in spots. For example, it isn't clear that everything you put cubes on the board for requires you to first remove opponent's cubes. It's clear in some spots, but not others (such as issues - we couldn't figure out why it said to remove *an* issue cube from each issue, although we did play it correctly by removing one of each color when we just left cubes on the issues - it comes out the same mathematically.

There needs to be a tally board to keep track of who is winning on points. We had no idea until we did the final tally! I can imagine that it would be easy to screw it up, which tells me that this would be an excellent computer game. We also used the state tiles face down so that we could see the electoral number easily (the board's numbers are very small).

All in all, I'm looking forward to giving it another shot. The "all points scored at the end" doesn't bother me too much, although it's clear that the various support draws at the end can have a huge effect, and it's important to work to get support cubes into the bag on the last turn. A lot to think about in this game, and I'm sure that with such a short playing time (we took three hours with many rules lookups) it will see time on the table.

1 comment:

Laurent said...

I would definitely play it again now that I've an idea of where I'm going.
I had no idea of what cards I put down for the debate and in addition there was a card that should not have been there (I guess I need to learn to read).

About counting as the game progresses, I'm afraid that would lead to too much down time as we will try to maximize. Keeping it this way leaves some uncertainty which matches the theme better I think.

Sorry for re-writing history. You can not trust new citizens with elections :)