Recently in BGG.CON 2006 Category
Last night, Mike told me to try out Balam. He had liked it. So, when I saw it in the library, I checked it out. And for the first thing today, I sat down and started puzzling out the rules. Luckily, two people came by and I convinced them to play the game. There were English rules, but the translation was really, really, bad. It lead to a lot of confusion. But we persevered and finally figured out how the game play went.
The first city that I built was simple (two villages and a palace). The next city was placed on a 4 spot obsidian tile and built two villages and two garrisons. This immediately caused a reaction as the other players scrambled to build garrisons as well. I was not going to provoke a fight yet. However, Nightmare decided to attack me. I was a little suspicious when she picked me and not her boyfriend. But I could see that my city was undefended and his was not. She rolled a two and got to destroy my palace. I realized that this effectively took me out of the game since I could not move the goods that are produced into my king's personal finances. Which meant that I could not build buildings anymore.
So, after we had discussed this all out, I retaliated and picked one of her undefended cities and rolled a 3. This destroyed her palace and a village. Two people out of the game on turn 3. And upon a reread of the rules, I notice that we missed the "Leniency of Chaak" bit where we get two more corn goods on each round before the Eclipse.
We decided to call the game at that point. I was happy that I played it though. That play certinally took it off of my buy list. Because I have heard that the bad events are really nasty in this game. Maybe it just needs the proper mindset from the start to plan for catastrophies or wars to turn it into a better experience.
We tried a hand of Control Nut and then moved to the game of Mu. Marty went out looking for a fifth and found Lewis. So we taught the game to him. I was successful in my powers of suckup. He picked me twice as a partner because of the cards that I was displaying. Unfortunately for us, we failed our goal. I was also more agressive in bidding in this game. I made one goal and lost another (to Gravitt of all people ;).
Minor regrets:
- Not playing more new Essen games. My main goal of this con was to check out all of the releases and determine if I should buy them.
- Some new Essen games had no English rules translations yet.
- Not playing a full game of Tichu at all! WTF?
- Being burned by the camera flash. Apparently, it was not having enough power to recharge the flash. But it had enough power to keep the display on and make the capacitor whining noise. Which made me think that it was on but not working for some unknown reason.
- Not playing disc golf in Dallas or in Waco on the trip up or back. No biggie...
Interesting facts:
- I only checked out two games out of the library (Fiji and Balam) and I didn't bring any games from home to the con.
Still, it was a blast.
I was reading the rules to Fiji, but had to take a break. For it was flea market time. What a madhouse! I did buy Goldbräu but had to leave since the mad press of people was getting to me...
The first of the new Friese games that I played was Fiji. It is a quick and light filler game that uses simultaneous reveal as its mechanics. There are four rounds of the following:
- Distribute beads: Everyone gets 5 green, 4 red, 3 yellow, and 2 blue beads. Put the same amount in the center of the board.
- Determine exchange conditions: There will be four groups of two cards. The first card says what the goal is. The second card is the action that is taken if the goal is fulfilled. A goal can be the most of one or more colors or the least of one or more colors. The action can be to take some number of gems (varies based on the color), or half rounded down of a color, or everyone else but you takes one, or some funky actions like mess with the ranking of colors or take back what gems that you showed.
- Determine goal conditions: There are four cards (one for each color). The card will say if you are going for the most or the fewest of a color. Remember that when you shuffle these cards, suffle their orientations as well! The order of the cards determine tie breakers. The color on the leftmost is the one that you are going for with ties broken by the next leftmost.
- The exchange: There are three rounds of exchanging. Players simultaneously pick from one to four beads and place them in their hand. They are revealed and we will check the four conditions one at a time. The trick here is that if players are tied for the most/least of something, then the next place person wins. If everyone is tied, then noone wins.
- Distribute shrunken heads: The first place player will get a number of heads totalling the number of people in the game minus one. The second player will get one less. And so on...
All in all, it was a light game. You must like the simultaneous revealing of gems part because you do a lot of it. Of course, it sucks to have your count be duplicated by people for one or more goal conditions and therefore be nullified.
I was happy when Kevin was carrying around Perikles and wanted to play it. We found four other people and started explaining the game. Unfortunately for me, it was right around 1pm when we finished the first round of the game. I was hungry for lunch and wanted to run down to get something to go. Sadly, no one else wanted to do that so they used that opportunity to stop playing the game. So not much to report here as I need a full playing of it. Gah! Too bad my gaming group is anti-Wallace.
I went to lunch with Kevin, Debra, Kevin, Tim, Mary, and Marty. During lunch, the topic of which show had the most spinoffs. Both Happy Days and Cheers were discussed. Of course, there was massive verification as three people in this picture web surfed on their PDAs. Such geeks...
Another playing of Imperial. And this time I knew what I was doing and I was France. I was able to build up her forces rather nicely. Which painted a hugh bulls-eye on me. One of the interesting things about this is that there are two ways people can resolve this. They can either beat the country down by taking back the territory and destroying the armies/navies. Or, they can just buy shares in that country. If they go the shares route, then they can either go for a minority holding in your country and let you run things because you know what you are doing. Or, they can go for a hostile takeover and do something else with the country. Interesting.
For the first game, Age of Steam looked like a likely candidate. Some one had set it up and was willing to play. Little did I know that he has played in a lot of tournaments and had designed this map. But I wanted to get more AOS experience under my belt, so I was game to try it out.
This map introduces a couple of new features. The first is building over water. This is more costly than over mountains (costs 6 dollars) and can only be built over one water section. The second is water/land hexes. When you build on these, there are two cases. If the next tile is land, then the tile acts like a river, otherwise it acts like a water hex. The last new feature is the engineer action is a temporary +1 link ability. This allows you to deliver length 7 goods for one turn if you engine capacity is at six.
The map is very tight. I passed the first auction and built off by myself. When the game was 2/3rds over, I finally broke even. Dakarp was probably hurt by building next to rri1 (the designer). So, the game turned out into a pretty obvious first (rri1 - ending in the 100s), second (me), and third (dakarp).
Eggert Spiele's new game is called Imperial. I have learned that the game has been in development for years now and was actually the precursor to Antike. People who have played Antike will recognize a lot of similiarity to Antike. A roundel determines what action is performed. You can move three spaces for free and optionally pay to move up to three more. The actions are as follows:
- Maneuver - move ships and armies. You can convoy armies across ships. Armies and ships can occupy neutral territorys to gain income. Or they can attack other country's troops or factories.
- Investor - causes a payout to shareholders from the countries bank. The investor marker moves around.
- Import
- Production - All factories may produce their corresponding units.
- Taxation - generates income to the country's bank and may give you money.
- Factory - the country pays five million to create a factory (either an army or naval factory).
What is different in this game is that you are an investor in countries. If you own the most shares in a country, then you determine its actions when the country's turn comes up. Shares have a cost to purchase, a percentage of interest that you receive when the investor action is taken, and a victory point total. The score track on the board acts like Antike. When one country reaches 25, then the game is over. This track is also broken up into sections. These sections tell you what multiplier to use against the corresponding country shares. It starts out with a x0 and goes up to a x5 for the 25 spot. So if United Kingdom won and I had a 6 million share in it, then my victory points would be 5x3 since that share has a 3
In the game, I was hosed early. I sent one fleet out into the Mediterranean sea. I had wanted to use that ship to move my armies into Africa. However, France decided to attack me and remove the ship instead of peacefully coexisting. This forced me to then spend turns building up my armies and attacking France back to get controll that I needed. This pissed off France (the person playing it) because he was not in the lead and he wanted my to attack the leader. I just needed to increase Italy's presence to get more money. Since having money allows you to buy shares in the countries that are winning.
Still, it is a cool game and one that I will definately buy.
Mike checked this game out of the library because it is another new Essen game where we had English rules for it. We only got to play a couple of rounds for it since I needed to head off for dinner soon. The Texas Hold-Em tournament would be immediately after dinner.
This game is like Thurn und Taxis. But the new thing that it brings to the table is the process to determine which tiles you receive. On the lower left section of the board is a grid. You can place pieces either on the numbered circles or on top of the tiles. To place a piece, you pay the price in the circle. If you go on top of a tile, you pay 2 dollars. After everyone has placed all four of their pieces, we determine who receives the tiles. If a tile is surrounded by more of your pieces than someone else's (including being on top of it), then you get it. Ties are broken by first being on top of the tile, or second, having more pieces orthagonally touching the tile. After all of the tiles have been resolved, then we determine payouts. For all of the numbered rows and columns, a person gets the triangle point value in dollars.
The next phase is the placing of the tiles. Essentially, you move your marker around the board while paying the cost on the paths. If you turn in a tile for a city (which only takes one type of tile), then you place a house down. And when an area is surrounded by houses, you get to put a marker in the lower right section of the board. This section will give you victory points.
In this game, poor Mike was alway hosed by me. I was sitting to his right. And when I needed to commit my pieces to try and get certain tiles, it just happened to be what Mike was going after. Sadly, due to the luck of the draw for the tiles, there was really no other choice for me. I needed those pieces for my path.
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.
