BGG.CON: Thursday
Jon and I drove up to Dallas this morning at 7 am. We stopped at Rudy's for some breakfast tacos and geeked out on the ride up. We arrived in Dallas at 10:30. So we wandered around town for a bit. Wouldn't this make a great spot for a game of Big City?
There it is, the Plaza of the Americas! The building that holds the convention. It is a pretty nice architecture. A giant enclosed area gives a feeling of spaciousness. See the skyway that allows travel from the Adam's Mark to the Plaza? Who needs to go out in the real world now?
Here it is...the tunnel into goodness...
The Red Prize tables
The Blue Prize table
Badges
People are playing before the registration even...
Oooo... Space Dealer...
New games from Essen (front)
New games from Essen (back)
The game library is in a new and bigger room.
The rare game, Big Boss, is sitting there in shrink!
And Age of Renaissance is there also in shrink!
This is one of the new Eggert-Spiele games that I have been dying to try. It is a 30 minute game with two one-minute sandtimers that perform actions for you. You use them to produce goods, move your ship to transport goods to other player's locations (dropping them off for victory points), building on to your space station, research new technology, or mining goods (generally causing modules to function). Each card that you build has a one-time demand of goods. When the matching goods are delivered by another person, they place their marker on your building and they will score victory points. Usually, you score lesser victory points as well. So it is in your best interest to build building cards to lure people to your space station. One thing to keep in mind is that the modules must be powered in order to function. So, it is critical to upgrade your generators from level 1 (powering two spots) to level 3 (powering four spots). Ships move around a round track which also serves as the score track. There is each of the individual player's planet seperated by a neutral planet. For example, to move to my right hand player's space station, I need to spend one action to move right and arrive at a neutral planet, spend another action to move to the next planet. Then, you can drop off the goods to fufill victory points. It costs you nothing to teleport back to your home planet, but you loose any undelivered goods.
The game is short, tense, and deviod of waiting on other people to calculate their turns. You spend most of your short downtime planning future moves. And you definately want to keep track on what other people are mining to see if they can deliver their goods before you can.
This game is off to a great start. Now will it be a lasting game and have enough staying power to keep it fresh and interesting? Only the sands of time will tell...
Mike brought us another new Essen game to try. One made by the Bambus Spieleverlag company. I definately recognized the green box from an earlier game of theirs: Kanaloa. It billed itself as a 45-60 minute game. The rules were not that difficult to figure out from the translation (there was one hiccup of determining the order of player actions). This game is about performing tours of the country side for victory points. You are either building up the country side or holding a tour. At the start of the game you can choose one of four actions: 1) tour, 2) build, 3) build OR tour, 4) build AND tour. Once you have performed an action, you flip that marker face down (taking it out of your possible choices), and play passes to the left. When the last player has played, they move a "x2" marker to the person on their right and perform one extra turn. This process continues until everyone uses all of their actions. Then, the actions are flipped back to face up and everything repeats. Players have one tour card in front of them. This is the goal that they are trying to fulfil. It has the length of the hex spots that must be crossed and the numbers of things that people want to see. These can be nature areas (trees), culture spots (houses), sports locations (circles), and/or shopping locations (cubes). The cards also tell you the minimum and maximum possible numbers of each of spots. For example, you might have to perform a tour over nine hexes that must visit at least one nature area (with a maximum of three), two culture spots, one sports location (with a maximum of two), and one shopping area (with a maximum of three). For each of your own buildings and nature areas that you visit, you get a buck (a victory point). Other people's building pay the corresponding person. And if you do not meet the critera of the tour, you loose dollars for each thing that was missed. This game was simple in concept. But our group turned it into a real brain burner. The game lasted two hours and thirty minutes! It was rather difficult trying to figure out valid tour paths. The length of the tour was what was killing us. It is hard to find a tour that travels exactly nine hexes and fufils the conditions.
Mike Chapel succumbed to call of new, shrink-wrapped games and bought one. It was Iliad. Which was a card game about battles. What was amusing was that Mike couldn't handle the continued use of the term "her" where you would normally use the sexist "his".
The army cards represent units. And the units follow rock/paper/scissors like rules. For example, the Archer defeats Chariots and Hoplites. Ballista defeat Chariots and Elephants. Chariots defeat Archers and Hoplites. Hoplites can form phalanxes where their total is the sum of the points times the number of cards.
There are two types of rounds: Thanatos or Gorgons. For Thanatos rounds, everyone plays cards until they pass. When you pass, you get the highest ranking hero (from 4 down to 1). The person with the most units left on the board (plus the hero) gets their choice of one of two victory cards. The second place person gets the other. And the person who had the least number will get the Thanatos card which contains a negative victory point number. A Gorgon round is quicker in that, at the start of a person's turn, if they have the highest army, then they immediately win. They get one victory card and the battle is over.
For our first Gorgon round, Jon essentially played a spoiler. I started out with a hariot (a wall that stops chariots and has 0 value). Paul dropped out. Mike played an elephant (x2 multiplier). Jon played an elephant. I played a hoplite (valued 4). Mike played a hoplite on the elephant valued 3 (x2 = 6). Jon put an archer on his elephant. Now it comes to my turn. If I play a 2 valued hoplite (4+3x2 = 6), then Mike will likely play another hoplite on his elephant. Jon does something. I would go for more hoplites to get my multiplier greater than Mike but then Jon would have no choice to use that archer to stop me. This would give the victory to Mike since Jon's army value is so low. So, instead, I dropped out and gave the battle to Mike. Sigh.
We had 30 minutes to kill before we had to go and play the ultimate meaty game of Texas De Brazil. So, Jon and myself taught newbies jridpath and John Pastor the ultimate partner game of trick taking -- Tichu. After explaining the rules we played a couple of hands. The first hand was an uninteresting 50/50. But on the second hand, in my first eight cards were two aces and the Dragon. So I called Grand Tichu. In the next six were the Phoenix and my partner passed me another Ace. Of course, the other team passed me the Dog. I had no trouble making that hand. Hopefully, we planted the seed of Tichu in two new people.
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