Author: matt

This wasn’t a minor infraction but instead renders our recent playing of the game a complete exercise in lunacy. Since it was the first time I’d played in 2 years and only the 2nd time I’ve ever played I suppose I can’t fault myself too much. As usual, the game play seemed a little odd in this area and Ken even mentioned it seemed mildly strange but it wasn’t bad enough that it made us stop and say, “that just can’t be!”. Even if we had, I’m not sure we would have caught it given that the Mayfair rules are a little ambiguous and at least one illustrated image is incorrect. I must regrettably acknowledge Ken’s frustration and must say, he was…he was…he was…right. There I said it. Ken was right.

The problem stems from resolving external conflict. When a player places a tile that joins two kingdoms and external conflict occurs, the tile is covered with the ‘handshake’ tile (no cube is awarded for the tile placement) and the conflict must be resolved in the order determined by the player placing the tile. The two warring dynasties must count their supporters on their side of the handshake tile. Then the attacker optionally commits additional supporters and the defender optionally commits supporters. The battle is won by the player with the largest total sum of supporters (ties won by the defender).

It was pretty clear to us that the supporters added to the battle from behind our screens had to be of the same color as the supporters we counted on the battlefield. However, we had the color all wrong. The Mayfair illustration shows a green tile being laid and two green traders battling. The wording of the rule concerning the term ‘supporters’ lead me to believe that the supporter color was dictated by the color of the tile that was joining the kingdoms. I missed the one phrase that indicates that the supporters are the tiles that match the conflicted leader‘s color. It has nothing to do with the color of the tile being placed. Doh!

Multi-leader conflicts resolve rather strangely when you play the game this incorrectly. For example, say I lay a blue farmer joining two kingdoms and choose to resolve the green trader conflicts first. In our purple haze of interpretation, we would have used blue to determine supporter strength since a blue tile was placed. That in and of itself is strange but think about what happens after the conflict is resolved; after the blue tiles are removed, subsequent conflicts really collapse since your supporters evaporated on the previous conflict.

I knew we would play the game incorrectly but I could not have imagined it would have been so far from the correct path. I guess that means I just need to play some more. Anybody up for another game?

The Analog Game Night (AGN) groupies met last night at Paul’s house. Thanks for hosting Paul!

We had six attendees to start with which broke us into two tables, one played four-player Ingenious and the other table played Hive until the seventh player arrived.

After Ingenious broke up, my table broke out Tigris and Euphrates while the other table played San Juan followed by Amazonas.

Acting like members of the Tourette’s Syndrome Gaming Club, most of the evening was punctuated by spurious cries of “Ingenious!” regardless of what we were playing.

I haven’t played T&E for over two years and it was like learning the game all over again. I don’t think I ever ‘got’ the game when I played before and I’m sure I don’t ‘get’ it now either. There is a lot to think about in the game and the ramifications of a move, in many cases, is difficult to predict until you’re halfway into it. We had situations where two large fully staffed kingdoms united with an external conflict and it was difficult to choose in what order the battles should occur.

Nobody played catastrophe tiles which really should have played on my kingdom (thankfully the weren’t). Had they been played, it would have severed my connection to two revenue generating monuments. Of course, I didn’t mention that fact but I think Mat was almost ready to play one. He didn’t get a chance to play them though when Ken ended the game in such a way that caused all of his leaders to become removed from the board during the battle resolution giving Tim the treasure that triggered the game end. Oh well, I can see it will take many more enjoyable plays to ‘get’ it.

It got a little late to teach the kids Tigris and Euphrates so we decided to play Himalaya with the downloadable d20 replacement cards.

The replacement cards remove the randomness of restocking goods and orders in the villages allowing you to predict where they’ll show up. I didn’t, however, find myself anticipating plunder in particular villages even though some card counted would have given me some future insight. I chalk it up to not fully engaging all of my mental capacities since I was playing with my kids. For those who game with me you know that that’s a crock of heaping crapola but this is my blog not yours.

We hadn’t unpacked the d20 but we ended up getting it out of the box and we used it to indicate the starting player for each round. After the first few rounds we ran out of cards (you use half of them just to setup the board) and I chose to shuffle the discards which took us through the rest of the game. When using the d20, if you roll the number of a village that is already occupied by goods or an order, you’re supposed to just increment the value until you get to an empty village. After the reshuffle, this situation arose for us as well and we chose to just flip up subsequent cards until we exposed an empty village. I hope that’s how you’re supposed to handle that situation but since I can’t read the French on Tilsit’s web site I’m not sure.

Noah has always been a meeple-arranger and tonight was no exception.

Lisa heard about Chaos Tiles by Ed Pegg Jr. on NPR a few years ago and ordered it. You can really see Ed’s mathematical skills come through when the directions to the game involve validating moves by examining the angle one piece has with another (any play that makes a 20 degree angle is illegal!).

Other than the fantastic ‘bakelite’ pieces, the game is pretty lacking. About the only time the pieces see the light of day is to get them out for the younger crowd to play with like a puzzle. To add insult to injury, getting them back in the 9-sided box requires a cheat-sheet and about 15 minutes of silent meditation.

A recent thread on BGG discussed the topic of meeple nakedness. There were lots of images of meeples taken from games and it’s easy to see why one might think meeples are naked or they at least wear the permanently molded clothing of ‘action figures’ of days gone by.

In pondering this I realized that I had taken some artistic liberties by clothing my meeples when I implemented a Carcassonne game several years ago. The thief however looks a little like something from the Village People…not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Himalaya is an excellent “pick up and deliver” game where five villages on the board place orders for goods and a different set of five villages manufacture goods ready for shipment. Players traverse the board to pick up goods offered in one village and carry them to distant villages to fulfill orders. When a village’s goods are depleted or an order is fulfilled, a 20-sided die (20d) is rolled to choose another village to manufacture goods or place an order. At the beginning of each round, there are always five villages producing goods and five villages with unfulfilled orders.

The game is pretty neat but it does suffer somewhat from the use of the 20d. With the 20d, players cannot count on an even distribution across villages throughout the game. If players could predict where goods and orders will be available in upcoming rounds, they can begin to incorporate that knowledge into a strategy of traversing the board. Tilsit has recently made available card paste-ups that replace the 20d. The cards, are shuffled at the beginning of the game and then turned up, one at a time, when a new village must be selected. The cards depict all twenty villages so players can predict the likelihood of a specific village being next in line.

I downloaded the card fronts and backs and my gaming buddy King “I Love Imperial Margarine” Keith printed them out for me. I don’t have a laminator but I did my best with clear packing tape. I’m looking forward to playing with the variant and plan to post a full review in the near future.

Sophie, Noah, and I played a game of Clans by Leo Colovini tonight. It’s safe to say that I’m already a Clans fan given I spent a considerable amount of time writing my own Clans implementation for Marquand.net but I’ve never done a real review of the game.

Clans depicts a point in our prehistory when our ancestors scratched out a nomadic existence. As resources in the territories became more scarce, the people became more desperate and conflicts arose driving small groups into surrounding territories. The game is played on a board depicting twelve regions made up of four terrain types (mountain, steppe, forest, grassland). Each region is populated by five clan huts, one of each color, and one hut per terrain type making a total of sixty huts spread out on the board.

The game has a unique characteristic that all colors are used no matter how many people are playing and your color is kept secret from your opponents. On your turn you move all of the huts from one region to an adjacent region on the board. The only stipulation is that you cannot move huts from a territory that contains seven or more huts (but you can add more huts to that territory) and you may not move huts into a region that is barren (devoid of huts).

The game is played over five epochs depicted on the right hand side of the board. Each epoch contains from one to four tokens awarded when huts form a village (become surrounded on all side by barren territories). When huts coalesce into a village, the player creating the village is awarded the next token from the epoch chart and each color of hut represented in the village is awarded the number of points equal to the total number of huts in the village. In this way, colors that are not represented by a player can receive points during play. If all colors are represented in the village, strife occurs and any colors represented by only a single hut are removed from the village and then points are awarded using the remaining huts.

Each epoch depicts two terrain types that receive special treatment while tokens are still available. The terrain type on the left indicates bonus points awarded to the villages formed on that terrain. The terrain type on the right indicates an ‘unfavored’ type where villages formed on that type receive no points (but the token is still awarded).

The game ends immediately when the last token from the epoch track is awarded or when no more villages can be formed. Players then expose their hidden color and bonus points are awarded to represented colors equal to the number of tokens received during the game. The player with the most points is the winner.

The game is, for the most part, an abstract. The theme, although present, is irrelevant to the mechanics but it doesn’t conflict with the overall game play. I find the game an interesting beast. I’ve read comments that the game ‘plays itself’ but I’m not really sure what that means. My best guess is that players who agree with the statement, feel that there is little one can do to influence play. I wholeheartedly disagree with the statement! Clans is a game that I feel gives back the level of brain energy you put into it. If you act like it’s a brain burner then it will be.

I enjoy the hidden color aspect of the game where you try to outfox your opponents into thinking you’re a different color; the hope being that they inadvertently reward you points by included you in their villages. I enjoy the brain-buzz you get analyzing your opponents moves in an attempt to determine what color they are. The more you know about another player, the better prepared you are to stranding them on an unfavored terrain or locking them out of points due to strife. I enjoy trying to force as many of my opponents huts into an every shrinking region causing them to lose the ability to influence other parts of the board. And finally, I enjoy trying to outguess my opponents moves; should I make the village now or should I wait….

The game is somewhat of a pain to setup. Although different every time, there is a strategy to organizing the huts so that you get an even distribution of colors when the game begins. It’s not a game I enjoy playing every time I sit down but I do enjoy it. It plays fast and is enjoyable across the 2-4 player range listed on the box. As an added bonus, my kids enjoy it and, for the most part, understand the strategy.

A recent geeklist on BGG enumerated the history of the site and how it’s changed over time.

From Tom Vasel’s Interviews by an Optimist #32: Scott Alden:

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“During one of the Metrogamers game sessions, I mentioned to Derk that I was running this website and with a little modification and hacking I could get it working for board games. . . . wouldn’t that be cool!? He was interested, because he was also coming up with game categorization and a rating scheme for board games. We decided to merge forces where I would program the site, and Derk would pump in content. We initially used Derk’s Metrogamer session reports and some reviews written by Metrogamer Neil Carr and himself. Initially we had about 100 articles and enough content to launch BoardGameGeek in January 2000.”

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Aldie posted a comment about this month’s traffic that struck me as amazing:

This month is seeing about 25,000 visitors/day with 86,000 registered.

Makes you wonder how many lurkers there are that haven’t registered…

I hate playing with an incorrect rule. Arg!

After checking the rules, you can show all of your tiles to your opponents and restock all of your tiles from the bag (and then throw in your previous tiles) if you do not possess any tiles with the colors shown by your lowest cubes on your scoring card.

I was playing under the assumption that if you had more than one color of cubes tied for last on your scoring card that you could not swap your tiles. My rules clearly state “any of the colors” indicating that there can be more than one.

I finished reading The Game Inventor’s Guidebook this evening. The book is an extremely easy read. Although I’m not serious about designing a boardgame, I am intrigued by the process, and greatly respect the amount of work that goes into producing a good game. The book is broken into three distinct sections spread across six chapters:

• Some high level history of games in the industry from Monopoly, D & D, Trivial Pursuit, Magic: The Gathering, and Pokemon
• How the industry works & things your should know
• Selling a game step by step

I recommend the book to all gamers even if you don’t think you will ever design your own game.