Carey and Tim joined me at Mike's for an evening of close calls. For me, anyway.
First up was Quo Vadis, a game I've never been fond of. As the baby in my family, I tend to avoid confrontation, and negotiation often feels very confrontational to me. I really hate buying cars. In this game, however, I felt less threatened by the particular mix for reasons I'm not clear on myself.
In this game, my third playing, I had an actual plan: focus on the lower right side of the board (there's a committee of three in the corner), start working up the path of singles just to the left, and try to clog up the single path out of the lowest "five" committee (which worked really well). I was very aggressive in getting the first piece into the top committee, and was successful when I'd put Caesar in the path from the rightmost three committee feeding into the top slots and everyone else apparently had other things to do. At that point it was all about getting laurels, and I felt that I was doing well catching up to Mike and Carey, who had the tallest stacks of counters.
In the end, everyone had gotten someone into the top committee, although Carey got there last. We didn't need the tiebreaker as it turned out, darn it, as Carey edged me by a single point, with Tim and Mike right behind. The final scores, IIRC, were 35-34-33-30. A very tight game, certainly a "half-turkey" if you are using the Dave definition.
Next up was Evo, Joe Steadman's favorite game. Tim got off to a very strong start in this game, getting the first egg and thus the only one to produce two dinos per turn for a while. I went for a balanced strategy, ending up with three legs, two fur/parasols, two eggs, and a long tail. I also had one of the two horns (the other showed up at the end of the game), which I used my card that forced people to pay three more mutation points to keep bidding, a ploy that worked.
Sadly, I was paying one or two more mutation points and not getting extra dinos early on, so I was falling behind. Also, I wasn't being aggressive with my horned dinos early, and on my second attempt I lost a dino that shouldn't have been moving anyway (I ended up screwing up the move and losing an extra dino to climate). Getting knocked down to four dinos at that point ensured that I needed to hope for a long game.
Indeed, I did a good job of coming back, being within two points of my closest competition and six behind Tim when the meteor got to the 1-2 space. And, of course, it hit the planet. Carey had a +2 point card to give him second. I think I'd have been right in it had I not made that one poor decision in the midgame.
Also odd in this game was the climate: other than a single roll that moved things backwards, and a couple of climate cards that skipped over the beach or mountain climates, everything went like it was supposed to. Every other time I've played the game there were as many wacky climate changes as normal ones, but this one went in the right direction.
Having made it this far to be thwarted in my efforts to win a game, we next tried out a wacky little title Mike got in Essen called Fruit Thief. I could be very wrong in remembering this title. Clearly a very light title (each player turns over one of their set of 10 cards, then secretly choose which of the cards you want to visit, then get points based on who went where). That's the whole game. It was cute, and very light, and would be a good family game. I was once again within a point or two of winning (IIRC, the scores were almost identical to Quo Vadis), but Carey edged me again. Damn you, Carey!
We had time for a couple of hands of No Thanks, also called Geschenckt. This is another very light game, but one that requires a certain amount of triage, which I really like. This is the game I am most likely to teach non-gamers to play, as it teaches very quickly and plays fast as well. In our first hand, I started out with a lot of almost-neighbor cards, and managed to get a few of them connected up to save points, but more important was not running out of chips. In the second hand, I ended up with one of the 30 cards early, then proceeded to draw a few more in sequence - guess I should have shuffled better! I let one go around the table a couple of times before raking in the chips and the card, but decided to just take the next two in the sequence. There was one more card that I nearly took later in the hand, but Carey had run out of chips just before I was going to pick it up. I ended up winning the two hands by about 10 points. Finally!
The whole key to No Thanks is simply not to allow yourself to run out of chips. Taking a few larger cards early actually gives you a little flexibility, not to mention chips that give you time as well. Light it may be, but there is enough depth, suspense (you never know what cards aren't available), and speed to make it perhaps my favorite quickie game, certainly better than For Sale.
Thanks to Mike for hosting, as always.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Weekend Wargaming, 5/27/06
Cruelly trapped at home with my dogs while my wife is out having three martini lunches in San Francisco, Chuck was kind enough to come save me from an afternoon of trying to sink Japanese shipping in a solitaire session of Silent war. So what did we play?
First up was Twilight Struggle, which Chuck has compared to dating for personality. The game went to turn 9, and I as the US was actually doing pretty well considering. Chuck bid 2 for the USSR (a low bid, I have learned, although I don't believe the bid had an effect on when the game ended). However, getting the two scoring cards for areas I was going to lose in killed me, again through no real fault of my own.
I made one or two errors, the first being not playing Defectors for the headline phase in the mid game, although the effect of this was minor. The bigger mistake was playing Allende instead of another card in my hand that let Chuck into South America (although, frankly, all he needed was a successful coup). When I got the South America and Asia scoring cards in that last hand, I knew I was dead as Chuck was going to pull down tons of points, enough to win handily.
Chuck, for his part, misplayed when he got the chance to order my hand (the one full of his events) and left the one that allowed me to discard a big card early in the mix. His card got discarded, of course - I had Suez Crisis, Muslim Revolution, and The Reformer, none of which I was anxious to play, and got away with just Suez getting done (when Chuck already controlled France and Israel).
What totally killed me was having Red Scare after Red Scare played on me, at least three of the nine turns. That's about 20 OPS points lost, and the space race suffered as well when I wasn't drawing sufficiently large enough cards. How I made it into turn 7 only a handful of points down, I don't know, but none of it mattered when the scoring cards started coming out.
I'm afraid that this game lives or dies on the deal. While I'm the first to admit that Hannibal has the same problem in close games (what you draw on turn 9 will determine the winner, I've found, but again only in close games), TS seems to have that problem throughout the game. Combined with the double punishment of scoring cards that can hurt you, I am ready to pronounce the game broken as a wargame, even with bidding. What a disappointment after such an exciting first game played with the incorrect rules!
Still, it was fun up to that point.
After lunch, we tried out Decision Game's ACW card-driven title "Battle Cry of Freedom". Despite the usual Decision "rules" and enough text on your hand of 13 cards to require 5 minutes of reading every turn in the early going, this seemed to be a fun little title. Yes, the luck of the draw is much larger here, although I think it's better than in, say, Blue vs Gray, where you are dependent upon drawing both useful combat units and generals. Cards have multiple uses, which is nice and makes hand management important. While the Union generally dictates pace, the Confederacy has the chance to mix it up a bit with certain types of cards.
Why would I like BCoF and not TS if they're both luck heavy? The answer is that BCoF allows you to get into trouble in a specific battle, but you are not likely to lose the entire game because of one bad hand. Plus, every card in BCoF is usable for at least a Frontal Assault at +1, so you get something for your trouble even if the cards aren't playable.
What I did notice (and would like to see if we got this part wrong, we seemed to get a lot wrong), was that bad generals seemed to be clogging up my hand much of the time. Given the South's leadership advantage, this seemed to me to be a problem with not much of a solution - you can only discard one general per turn, and when half of your hand is useless cards (they can't be used for the Frontal Assault, they are just generals), you are in trouble unless your opponent has the same problem.
Also, there was no way to differentiate generals that had been pulled from a theatre from those just drawn (the latter *must* be placed in specific theatres initially), which is why I'm wondering if perhaps that particular element was played incorrectly. Not that it mattered, we played through about a third of the game and I had done well at holding Chuck off up until my generals became a problem. Hard to say who would have won, although Chuck's infrastructure was doing much better than mine, creating a snowball effect that would almost certainly have doomed the South.
Regardless, we had fun playing both games, and it was a nice way to spend a rainy spring Saturday in Oregon. Thanks, Chuck!
First up was Twilight Struggle, which Chuck has compared to dating for personality. The game went to turn 9, and I as the US was actually doing pretty well considering. Chuck bid 2 for the USSR (a low bid, I have learned, although I don't believe the bid had an effect on when the game ended). However, getting the two scoring cards for areas I was going to lose in killed me, again through no real fault of my own.
I made one or two errors, the first being not playing Defectors for the headline phase in the mid game, although the effect of this was minor. The bigger mistake was playing Allende instead of another card in my hand that let Chuck into South America (although, frankly, all he needed was a successful coup). When I got the South America and Asia scoring cards in that last hand, I knew I was dead as Chuck was going to pull down tons of points, enough to win handily.
Chuck, for his part, misplayed when he got the chance to order my hand (the one full of his events) and left the one that allowed me to discard a big card early in the mix. His card got discarded, of course - I had Suez Crisis, Muslim Revolution, and The Reformer, none of which I was anxious to play, and got away with just Suez getting done (when Chuck already controlled France and Israel).
What totally killed me was having Red Scare after Red Scare played on me, at least three of the nine turns. That's about 20 OPS points lost, and the space race suffered as well when I wasn't drawing sufficiently large enough cards. How I made it into turn 7 only a handful of points down, I don't know, but none of it mattered when the scoring cards started coming out.
I'm afraid that this game lives or dies on the deal. While I'm the first to admit that Hannibal has the same problem in close games (what you draw on turn 9 will determine the winner, I've found, but again only in close games), TS seems to have that problem throughout the game. Combined with the double punishment of scoring cards that can hurt you, I am ready to pronounce the game broken as a wargame, even with bidding. What a disappointment after such an exciting first game played with the incorrect rules!
Still, it was fun up to that point.
After lunch, we tried out Decision Game's ACW card-driven title "Battle Cry of Freedom". Despite the usual Decision "rules" and enough text on your hand of 13 cards to require 5 minutes of reading every turn in the early going, this seemed to be a fun little title. Yes, the luck of the draw is much larger here, although I think it's better than in, say, Blue vs Gray, where you are dependent upon drawing both useful combat units and generals. Cards have multiple uses, which is nice and makes hand management important. While the Union generally dictates pace, the Confederacy has the chance to mix it up a bit with certain types of cards.
Why would I like BCoF and not TS if they're both luck heavy? The answer is that BCoF allows you to get into trouble in a specific battle, but you are not likely to lose the entire game because of one bad hand. Plus, every card in BCoF is usable for at least a Frontal Assault at +1, so you get something for your trouble even if the cards aren't playable.
What I did notice (and would like to see if we got this part wrong, we seemed to get a lot wrong), was that bad generals seemed to be clogging up my hand much of the time. Given the South's leadership advantage, this seemed to me to be a problem with not much of a solution - you can only discard one general per turn, and when half of your hand is useless cards (they can't be used for the Frontal Assault, they are just generals), you are in trouble unless your opponent has the same problem.
Also, there was no way to differentiate generals that had been pulled from a theatre from those just drawn (the latter *must* be placed in specific theatres initially), which is why I'm wondering if perhaps that particular element was played incorrectly. Not that it mattered, we played through about a third of the game and I had done well at holding Chuck off up until my generals became a problem. Hard to say who would have won, although Chuck's infrastructure was doing much better than mine, creating a snowball effect that would almost certainly have doomed the South.
Regardless, we had fun playing both games, and it was a nice way to spend a rainy spring Saturday in Oregon. Thanks, Chuck!
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Silent War - Dutch Mini-Campaign
It is no secret that I find Joe Steadman to be a horse's ass, and while many disagree with that opinion, I find as many or more people that found his presence on the Dice Tower to be a, uh, problem. A closet wargamer who found time to play an astonishing amount of games while teaching at an American ex-pat school in Korea, I found most of his reviews of wargames to be fanboyish and not containing much in the way of useful information.
Joe, all is forgiven. And all because you pimped Silent War, one of the premier titles from Compass Games. I was ready to pass this one over, largely because the designer is Brien J. Miller (damned hippie parents, you'd think they'd have learned to spell by the time they were fertile, plus do we really need the middle initial to distinguish you from that other Brien Miller?), late of Avalanche Games. Avalanche has a crap attitude toward customers, refusing to put out anything more than the most essential errata and pumping out games with a kazillion unplaytested scenarios. Plus, he did Airlines, perhaps the most pointless game ever. And I'm extra bitter because I bought that dog at $38 retail. But I was young.
But no, Joe said that this was a great little game, if a tad expensive ($70 retail, and I can't find it anywhere retail in Portland). And you know what? This will be the game that ends my marriage. It's the wargame equivalent of Sid Meier's Civilization (the first one, the one that nearly killed my master's degree).
The game is about the US submarine campaign in the Pacific in WWII, and it includes every sub that saw action in that theatre. That's a lot of subs. They go out, they find stuff to shoot at, the damned torpedos either miss or bounce off the damned hulls of glorified dinghies, they get sent home to sit in the damned broom box for umpteen turns while you miss those rolls too, and then you realize that it's 10pm and perhaps the dogs should be fed and taken out to poddy, and instead you PLAY ONE MORE FREAKIN' TURN.
Damn you, Brien J. Miller. Damn you to hell. I'll have to forgive you too.
The basis of the game is pretty easy, and there are lots of little "patrol" missions where you have a single sub trying to sink a certain number of ships/tonnage in a set amount of time. These are great learning scenarios, and even better if all you have is an hour or so to play. Assuming you can find the sub in the mess of, what, 150-200 sub counters. I strongly recommend you bag/sort these bad boys by entry date. When the sub is heading out, all you really do is check to see if anything goes wrong (which is unusual, especially if you are staying close to base). While the sub is out "on patrol" you generally roll to see if you get a contact, easier to do in some portions of the war (and there is a very clever mechanism to figure out when things start changing). If you do, you also roll to see if it's a large/small convoy or a task force, then cross reference the size of the contact with the type to determine what ships make up the convoy.
To do this, you have a set of ship counters, some warships/anti-sub aircraft, some supply ships/tankers/troop carriers. Based on what part of the war you are in, they are divided up into four groups, placed in cups, then drawn based on how the search came out. Task forces tend to have fewer merchants, and a larger proportion of capital ships, most of which are in the "D" cup.
No wonder I like this game, it has a cup size for everyone.
The ships are placed face down on the combat display, sorted by which cup they came out of. Merchants tend to have "meatball" flags on the backs, warships have "rising suns". You pick which column (ABCD) you want your sub to go after, then flip as many ships as your sub's tac rating (typically 4, at least in the early game). You then assign modifiers (TDCs, simulating things like attack angle, distance, etc) randomly to as many ships as the tac rating, which do not have to be in the same column or even revealed at that point. You then distribute your attack factors among the ships you wish to attack (in the early war when the torps were produced by the mid-century equivalent of Halliburton, you want to aim for a single ship unless you get two really good targets), and roll the dice to see if the torp manages to hit. Factors such as the robustness of the target, ASW in the area, distance from the sub (based on attacking adjacent or the same column), and the quality of torpedos play a big role. If you get a hit, you then get to see if the torp bothers to explode, or if it does so in an effective manner and place. The bigger the tonnage of the ship you are going after, the less chance a single shot will kill it, but it does happen. There are also "ships" that produce random effects, perhaps the most unsettling is when a torp is defective and circles back to take a shot at the sub that launched it! Now THAT is a bad day at sea.
After you get your shot off, the convoy gets a shot back at you. This can be no big deal if you didn't manage to turn over meatballs that were really very effective destroyers or aircraft, or the end of your submarining career, at least for that boat. Assuming you survive (which can include being spotted or damaged), you can turn over more ships (although you have to start with "rising sun" ships this time), and try again. If you've got a Super Skipper (seriously, that's what they're called), you can even try to take another shot. While second/third attacks have a slightly better chance, assuming no new ASW forces, the counterattacks are also more dangerous as well. However, given how tough it is to sink a ship in the early going of the war, you may want to take some chances.
There are also semi-randomized methods for determining how long a boat can stay out, how badly damaged a returning sub is, how long it takes to service a boat (including those coming into play), sub tenders, random war events such as the Fall of Manila, Special Mission Zones that suck up your subs from doing useful work, ULTRA intercepts that improve your chances of finding that really big convoy, wolfpacks, and who knows what else. And all of it flows so quickly that you will finish your game only to realize that you should have left to go to work three hours ago, and you started playing when you got home.
Damn you, Brien J. Miller.
I have played a single short patrol (you get 1-2 shots at finding/sinking ships, although patrols can last for several turns), as well as the Nederlander sub campaign in early '42 out of Surabaya in the Dutch East Indies. At four turns to the month, with up to eight subs in action (rare), it took me about two hours to finish this mini-campaign, and I've started another one with considerably more subs that is limited to the Solomons in late '42/early '43. A full campaign game, assuming you aren't sacked at one of the "got tonnage?" points, should last you about a month solid, assuming you don't, you know, work or eat or say hello to your wife/SO/family.
Compass, unlike Avalanche, has done a great job of including not only additional scenarios (the Nederlander and Solomons mini's were found online), but also additional counters if you don't feel like ever using the modern nuclear sub counter they included in the game. There are also additional counters from various nationalities, including one US boat that was originally a Type XIX Nazi sub captured off of Norway. In all, I think there are seven campaign games that will use the entire map and take a solid month or eight to play, ten or twelve patrols, and six or seven mini-campaigns, enough to keep you busy for a while.
While there are rules for two-player play, it basically means that you get a certain number of bases each that you operate from. I can't imagine that this would be fun unless you were doing it with a younger relative, such as a pre-teen that wanted to get in on one of "Dad's games" (and we grab those opportunites every time), but as a game for two grognards, I just can't see it. What I can see is tournament versions where one player takes the role of the Loyal Opposition while the other plays a short campaign, then they switch and compare scores. That could be cool.
So, there you have it. The Next Big Thing That Will Eat My Time. And I've got Joe Steadman and Brien J. Miller, people I would gladly sucker punch if I ever met them in public, to thank. Sigh.
Now I have to go play the Solomons campaign, all of the new boats are in and I'm hoping to get a Gato-class out there and see what it can do. That, and start a 12-step program for Silent War addicts.
Joe, all is forgiven. And all because you pimped Silent War, one of the premier titles from Compass Games. I was ready to pass this one over, largely because the designer is Brien J. Miller (damned hippie parents, you'd think they'd have learned to spell by the time they were fertile, plus do we really need the middle initial to distinguish you from that other Brien Miller?), late of Avalanche Games. Avalanche has a crap attitude toward customers, refusing to put out anything more than the most essential errata and pumping out games with a kazillion unplaytested scenarios. Plus, he did Airlines, perhaps the most pointless game ever. And I'm extra bitter because I bought that dog at $38 retail. But I was young.
But no, Joe said that this was a great little game, if a tad expensive ($70 retail, and I can't find it anywhere retail in Portland). And you know what? This will be the game that ends my marriage. It's the wargame equivalent of Sid Meier's Civilization (the first one, the one that nearly killed my master's degree).
The game is about the US submarine campaign in the Pacific in WWII, and it includes every sub that saw action in that theatre. That's a lot of subs. They go out, they find stuff to shoot at, the damned torpedos either miss or bounce off the damned hulls of glorified dinghies, they get sent home to sit in the damned broom box for umpteen turns while you miss those rolls too, and then you realize that it's 10pm and perhaps the dogs should be fed and taken out to poddy, and instead you PLAY ONE MORE FREAKIN' TURN.
Damn you, Brien J. Miller. Damn you to hell. I'll have to forgive you too.
The basis of the game is pretty easy, and there are lots of little "patrol" missions where you have a single sub trying to sink a certain number of ships/tonnage in a set amount of time. These are great learning scenarios, and even better if all you have is an hour or so to play. Assuming you can find the sub in the mess of, what, 150-200 sub counters. I strongly recommend you bag/sort these bad boys by entry date. When the sub is heading out, all you really do is check to see if anything goes wrong (which is unusual, especially if you are staying close to base). While the sub is out "on patrol" you generally roll to see if you get a contact, easier to do in some portions of the war (and there is a very clever mechanism to figure out when things start changing). If you do, you also roll to see if it's a large/small convoy or a task force, then cross reference the size of the contact with the type to determine what ships make up the convoy.
To do this, you have a set of ship counters, some warships/anti-sub aircraft, some supply ships/tankers/troop carriers. Based on what part of the war you are in, they are divided up into four groups, placed in cups, then drawn based on how the search came out. Task forces tend to have fewer merchants, and a larger proportion of capital ships, most of which are in the "D" cup.
No wonder I like this game, it has a cup size for everyone.
The ships are placed face down on the combat display, sorted by which cup they came out of. Merchants tend to have "meatball" flags on the backs, warships have "rising suns". You pick which column (ABCD) you want your sub to go after, then flip as many ships as your sub's tac rating (typically 4, at least in the early game). You then assign modifiers (TDCs, simulating things like attack angle, distance, etc) randomly to as many ships as the tac rating, which do not have to be in the same column or even revealed at that point. You then distribute your attack factors among the ships you wish to attack (in the early war when the torps were produced by the mid-century equivalent of Halliburton, you want to aim for a single ship unless you get two really good targets), and roll the dice to see if the torp manages to hit. Factors such as the robustness of the target, ASW in the area, distance from the sub (based on attacking adjacent or the same column), and the quality of torpedos play a big role. If you get a hit, you then get to see if the torp bothers to explode, or if it does so in an effective manner and place. The bigger the tonnage of the ship you are going after, the less chance a single shot will kill it, but it does happen. There are also "ships" that produce random effects, perhaps the most unsettling is when a torp is defective and circles back to take a shot at the sub that launched it! Now THAT is a bad day at sea.
After you get your shot off, the convoy gets a shot back at you. This can be no big deal if you didn't manage to turn over meatballs that were really very effective destroyers or aircraft, or the end of your submarining career, at least for that boat. Assuming you survive (which can include being spotted or damaged), you can turn over more ships (although you have to start with "rising sun" ships this time), and try again. If you've got a Super Skipper (seriously, that's what they're called), you can even try to take another shot. While second/third attacks have a slightly better chance, assuming no new ASW forces, the counterattacks are also more dangerous as well. However, given how tough it is to sink a ship in the early going of the war, you may want to take some chances.
There are also semi-randomized methods for determining how long a boat can stay out, how badly damaged a returning sub is, how long it takes to service a boat (including those coming into play), sub tenders, random war events such as the Fall of Manila, Special Mission Zones that suck up your subs from doing useful work, ULTRA intercepts that improve your chances of finding that really big convoy, wolfpacks, and who knows what else. And all of it flows so quickly that you will finish your game only to realize that you should have left to go to work three hours ago, and you started playing when you got home.
Damn you, Brien J. Miller.
I have played a single short patrol (you get 1-2 shots at finding/sinking ships, although patrols can last for several turns), as well as the Nederlander sub campaign in early '42 out of Surabaya in the Dutch East Indies. At four turns to the month, with up to eight subs in action (rare), it took me about two hours to finish this mini-campaign, and I've started another one with considerably more subs that is limited to the Solomons in late '42/early '43. A full campaign game, assuming you aren't sacked at one of the "got tonnage?" points, should last you about a month solid, assuming you don't, you know, work or eat or say hello to your wife/SO/family.
Compass, unlike Avalanche, has done a great job of including not only additional scenarios (the Nederlander and Solomons mini's were found online), but also additional counters if you don't feel like ever using the modern nuclear sub counter they included in the game. There are also additional counters from various nationalities, including one US boat that was originally a Type XIX Nazi sub captured off of Norway. In all, I think there are seven campaign games that will use the entire map and take a solid month or eight to play, ten or twelve patrols, and six or seven mini-campaigns, enough to keep you busy for a while.
While there are rules for two-player play, it basically means that you get a certain number of bases each that you operate from. I can't imagine that this would be fun unless you were doing it with a younger relative, such as a pre-teen that wanted to get in on one of "Dad's games" (and we grab those opportunites every time), but as a game for two grognards, I just can't see it. What I can see is tournament versions where one player takes the role of the Loyal Opposition while the other plays a short campaign, then they switch and compare scores. That could be cool.
So, there you have it. The Next Big Thing That Will Eat My Time. And I've got Joe Steadman and Brien J. Miller, people I would gladly sucker punch if I ever met them in public, to thank. Sigh.
Now I have to go play the Solomons campaign, all of the new boats are in and I'm hoping to get a Gato-class out there and see what it can do. That, and start a 12-step program for Silent War addicts.
Saturday Gaming, 5/20/06
Mike, Chuck, and Ben Harris (whom we will assume for now qualifies as "Ben" until Ben Fleskes shows up regularly again) showed up for some multi-player goodness on Saturday. The only planned game was Princes of the Renaissance, a Wallace title that I'd missed out on during the initial buzz. Chuck wanted to give it another go, Mike had played once some time ago, and Ben had yet to play a Wallace title, so this was an excellent choice.
Like most Wallace titles, the game focuses around players gaining control/interest in a set of common resources, in this case five major cities in Renaissance Italy, represented by six "city tiles" in each city that give you VP at the end (based on status, which is controlled through "wars" and by placing certain Event Tiles on a given city. You buy troops and treachery tiles, auction off city and event tiles, and declare wars that then auction off who controls which side in the war. Interestingly, there are two currencies in the game: Influence, typically rarer, and money. Troops and city tiles are paid for with money, the pope tile and the "condotierre" roles in wars with influence (although you then gain back money regardless of how you do), event tiles depend on the specific event, and treachery cards are one of each.
The thing that makes this game is the treachery tiles, at least in my book. Nothing like watching Mike's army once again unable to use his cavalry in the attack because of bribed troops. Hehe.
Not that any of this mattered. Mike creamed us all, mostly by declaring wars every chance he got, and by making use of his family tile and a city tile that lowered his costs of becoming condotierre. As such, he did quite well at wars, gathering six laurels, four more than anyone else and twice as many as the rest of us combined. The 21 points he gained from that was enough to put him well over the top. Also interesting was that only a single city got more than 3 VP per city tile at the end of the game, largely because I smacked Venice with a French Invasion for the final play of the game to bring it into a three way tie with everyone else but Milan (the 10 pointer) and Rome (the big loser, only I had ever purchased a Roman city tile and paid for it). Ben came in second, myself in third.
A fun game, and one I'll have to try again. I prefer this to Liberte, as it is easier to parse the game situation - all of those pastel control markers and primary color faction blocks make the board look like the floor of a Tilt-A-Whirl compartment on Free Cotton Candy Day at your local amusement park. Definitely not a problem in PotR.
Ben had to go, and Mike only had about an hour, so we tried out my new copy of Bollide, which I described in my Sunriver report (Day 3). We each played two cars, ostensibly for one lap. About 2/3rds of the way into the game, Chuck and Mike both called the game on account of boredom. They both felt it was a puzzle game, which in a way it (and about 3/4ths of designer games) is. True, I was doing well, but there is usually a strong leader in about 1/2 of the games this group plays, so I don't think that was it. We were playing at a brisk pace, too, although not fast enough to make it feel like you were under pressure to make a decision.
I think the real problem is that racing games become boring quickly if you aren't into racing games. Formula De has the same problem, as did Circus Minimus. Either you like these kinds of games, or you don't. Me, I love 'em.
Mike had to go, so Chuck and I grabbed some pizza, discussed the pitfalls of having 20-year-old daughters, and then came back to play the North Africa campaign of Rise of the Luftwaffe, an old GMT title from the early 90's that uses cards to simulate WWII era air battles. The campaign game has some interesting mechanisms and concepts that were expanded over the following three titles that covered the late ETO, early PTO, and late PTO. Dan Verssen came up with a very clever idea, but it became apparent as time went on that he really didn't have anything planned, especially as he started making more money in the CCG market. Still, there were improvements and the game has been pretty popular, with new campaigns in GMT's house magazine C3I. Chuck and I both enjoy the game, although luck can play a pretty big factor.
We started out with a dogfight that saw most of my fighters go down (a common occurrence, unfortunately - I tended to have attack cards most of the game), followed by a couple of raids by Chuck on airbases and factory complexes that went either very well or not so well. In the end, Chuck was up 35 points going into the final mission, but I had the benefit of having two elements of aircraft in my resource list while he was down to reducing FLAK over the target. Sadly, he drew a dogfight for the final mission, and I had no chance to recoup enough points to do more than go from "Miserable" to "Poor", so we called it a game. One of my favorite short wargames, although one that seems to be an acquired taste for many gamers.
Thanks to Chuck, Mike, and Ben for saving me from a boring Saturday stuck home with the dogs.
Like most Wallace titles, the game focuses around players gaining control/interest in a set of common resources, in this case five major cities in Renaissance Italy, represented by six "city tiles" in each city that give you VP at the end (based on status, which is controlled through "wars" and by placing certain Event Tiles on a given city. You buy troops and treachery tiles, auction off city and event tiles, and declare wars that then auction off who controls which side in the war. Interestingly, there are two currencies in the game: Influence, typically rarer, and money. Troops and city tiles are paid for with money, the pope tile and the "condotierre" roles in wars with influence (although you then gain back money regardless of how you do), event tiles depend on the specific event, and treachery cards are one of each.
The thing that makes this game is the treachery tiles, at least in my book. Nothing like watching Mike's army once again unable to use his cavalry in the attack because of bribed troops. Hehe.
Not that any of this mattered. Mike creamed us all, mostly by declaring wars every chance he got, and by making use of his family tile and a city tile that lowered his costs of becoming condotierre. As such, he did quite well at wars, gathering six laurels, four more than anyone else and twice as many as the rest of us combined. The 21 points he gained from that was enough to put him well over the top. Also interesting was that only a single city got more than 3 VP per city tile at the end of the game, largely because I smacked Venice with a French Invasion for the final play of the game to bring it into a three way tie with everyone else but Milan (the 10 pointer) and Rome (the big loser, only I had ever purchased a Roman city tile and paid for it). Ben came in second, myself in third.
A fun game, and one I'll have to try again. I prefer this to Liberte, as it is easier to parse the game situation - all of those pastel control markers and primary color faction blocks make the board look like the floor of a Tilt-A-Whirl compartment on Free Cotton Candy Day at your local amusement park. Definitely not a problem in PotR.
Ben had to go, and Mike only had about an hour, so we tried out my new copy of Bollide, which I described in my Sunriver report (Day 3). We each played two cars, ostensibly for one lap. About 2/3rds of the way into the game, Chuck and Mike both called the game on account of boredom. They both felt it was a puzzle game, which in a way it (and about 3/4ths of designer games) is. True, I was doing well, but there is usually a strong leader in about 1/2 of the games this group plays, so I don't think that was it. We were playing at a brisk pace, too, although not fast enough to make it feel like you were under pressure to make a decision.
I think the real problem is that racing games become boring quickly if you aren't into racing games. Formula De has the same problem, as did Circus Minimus. Either you like these kinds of games, or you don't. Me, I love 'em.
Mike had to go, so Chuck and I grabbed some pizza, discussed the pitfalls of having 20-year-old daughters, and then came back to play the North Africa campaign of Rise of the Luftwaffe, an old GMT title from the early 90's that uses cards to simulate WWII era air battles. The campaign game has some interesting mechanisms and concepts that were expanded over the following three titles that covered the late ETO, early PTO, and late PTO. Dan Verssen came up with a very clever idea, but it became apparent as time went on that he really didn't have anything planned, especially as he started making more money in the CCG market. Still, there were improvements and the game has been pretty popular, with new campaigns in GMT's house magazine C3I. Chuck and I both enjoy the game, although luck can play a pretty big factor.
We started out with a dogfight that saw most of my fighters go down (a common occurrence, unfortunately - I tended to have attack cards most of the game), followed by a couple of raids by Chuck on airbases and factory complexes that went either very well or not so well. In the end, Chuck was up 35 points going into the final mission, but I had the benefit of having two elements of aircraft in my resource list while he was down to reducing FLAK over the target. Sadly, he drew a dogfight for the final mission, and I had no chance to recoup enough points to do more than go from "Miserable" to "Poor", so we called it a game. One of my favorite short wargames, although one that seems to be an acquired taste for many gamers.
Thanks to Chuck, Mike, and Ben for saving me from a boring Saturday stuck home with the dogs.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
South Tuesday Session, 5/16/06
Mike and I made the trek out to Sherwood and Chris' place for Tuesday gaming. I'd recovered from the Sunriver retreat (I am getting too old for this little sleep over this much time), and was looking forward to some distractions from my 20 year old daughter's delusions of grandeur.
Chris wanted to burn down his unplayed games list, so out came Liberte. Plus, Dave wasn't there so other people had a chance to win. This is your classic Wallace title, with multiple people controlling three different political "parties" (it's hard to think of them as parties when a major part of campaigning involves chopping off the opposition's heads) in revolutionary era France. Despite color registration issues between one region on the board and the corresponding cards, plus a missing line in the rules, and that I had played a couple of times in 19-mumbletysomething and that was as good as it got, we did pretty well.
My initial hand was split between the reds and the blues, while Chris clearly was gunning for the white Royalists. I had exactly one chance before the fourth turn to get a white card without drawing randomly, and in fact I didn't have one in my hand at all until the final turn. Because this color has the fewest blocks, it actually gives the person with those cards an excellent shot at pulling off the counter-revolution, and my Reds were working hard to get this across to Mike, who was predominantly blue.
A critical mistake was when I chose not to play a general down and kill off Chris' general with a Purge card, but as I wanted to wait as long as I could, I held off one card play too long and Chris won an easy battle. Sadly, despite drawing about six generals in the game, I was unable to get one deployed and win a battle, and the tied battle in turn 3 was truly critical. Because, you see, Chris managed to get six more CR spaces on the board at the very end of the game to win an automatic victory. Me, I stalled out after turn 2 and only scored 2 points total for Langedoc. Very frustrating.
We did run through the voting process, as Chris hadn't realized he would win a counter-revolution, and it turned out that Mike pulled out a squeaker win due to cards still on the table. Had there not been a CR, of course.
I think that this is a great game, but you need more than three. It's too easy to just focus on one color, and Chris had enough white on the board that a CR victory was almost assured given the free extra space because of the battle. He was able to whip the pile of white blocks down in five or six rounds in the last couple of turns, and you just can't recover from something like that. Of course, if a couple of people are pushing white and you've got five players, the game can end in two or three rounds, so maybe that wasn't the problem. Regardless, this is a game that should come out more often. Too bad we have about a bazillion games like that.
Next up, Mike and I take on Dave in Return of the Heroes this Saturday (assuming I can talk Dave into it).
Chris wanted to burn down his unplayed games list, so out came Liberte. Plus, Dave wasn't there so other people had a chance to win. This is your classic Wallace title, with multiple people controlling three different political "parties" (it's hard to think of them as parties when a major part of campaigning involves chopping off the opposition's heads) in revolutionary era France. Despite color registration issues between one region on the board and the corresponding cards, plus a missing line in the rules, and that I had played a couple of times in 19-mumbletysomething and that was as good as it got, we did pretty well.
My initial hand was split between the reds and the blues, while Chris clearly was gunning for the white Royalists. I had exactly one chance before the fourth turn to get a white card without drawing randomly, and in fact I didn't have one in my hand at all until the final turn. Because this color has the fewest blocks, it actually gives the person with those cards an excellent shot at pulling off the counter-revolution, and my Reds were working hard to get this across to Mike, who was predominantly blue.
A critical mistake was when I chose not to play a general down and kill off Chris' general with a Purge card, but as I wanted to wait as long as I could, I held off one card play too long and Chris won an easy battle. Sadly, despite drawing about six generals in the game, I was unable to get one deployed and win a battle, and the tied battle in turn 3 was truly critical. Because, you see, Chris managed to get six more CR spaces on the board at the very end of the game to win an automatic victory. Me, I stalled out after turn 2 and only scored 2 points total for Langedoc. Very frustrating.
We did run through the voting process, as Chris hadn't realized he would win a counter-revolution, and it turned out that Mike pulled out a squeaker win due to cards still on the table. Had there not been a CR, of course.
I think that this is a great game, but you need more than three. It's too easy to just focus on one color, and Chris had enough white on the board that a CR victory was almost assured given the free extra space because of the battle. He was able to whip the pile of white blocks down in five or six rounds in the last couple of turns, and you just can't recover from something like that. Of course, if a couple of people are pushing white and you've got five players, the game can end in two or three rounds, so maybe that wasn't the problem. Regardless, this is a game that should come out more often. Too bad we have about a bazillion games like that.
Next up, Mike and I take on Dave in Return of the Heroes this Saturday (assuming I can talk Dave into it).
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