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My opportunities for gaming have been pretty slim lately so I was happy for June AGN to arrive. Paul was gracious enough to host so Paul, thanks for that. Your wife gave me the, “what a weirdo” look and asked “you’re taking pictures of a board game?” but phooey on her…what does she know.

Tim, our fifth, was going to be arriving late so we started with Zooloretto for four. Rich has owned a copy for quite awhile but I’ve just never had the opportunity to play it. Zooloretto is a light filler but not mindless. Like its parent game Coloretto, players place tiles drawn from a pile into groups, the trucks, in the middle of the table. The tiles represent vendor stalls, various animals, and money. Players can draw and place a tile, take a truck (along with it’s tiles), or execute a monetary action. Rinse, lather, and repeat until the game ends and the player with the most points after the scoring wins.

The goal is to gather trucks holding vendor stalls, animals, and money such that you can place the animals in exhibits in your personal playing area (the zoo). Exhibit space is limited and only one kind of animal can exist in single exhbit at a time. You’re trying to fill all of the exhibit spots with the correct number of animals (no less and no more) to maximize points. Vendor stalls mitigate risk of not filling an exhibit space and provide additional points at the game end. Money is used to execute monetary actions while you’re still in the round before you’ve taken a truck. Some additional rules further deepen (complicate?) the game such as: you can buy one additional exhibit space, you can use the barn in your zoo as ‘swing’ space if you need to restructure your exhibits, you can ‘purchase’ an animal from somebody else’s barn, etc. If you like Coloretto you’ll be very comfortable playing Zooloretto. It’s a slightly deeper experience but by no means brain burning.

I started to teach Tichu but before we got started, Tim arrived and we settled on an oldie but a goodie, El Grande. I went looking back in the blog and found that the last time we played El Grande was the November AGN in 2004! I’ll not go into details but suffice it to say that I did so poorly that I can hardly stomach the thought of it. It’s been long enough since I’ve played that the chaos factor of the action cards continually caught me off-guard. You can be so devastated by how those cards are played by your opponents. I repeatedly felt stuck in the situation where I wanted to go early in the round to get a sweet card yet if I went early I’d just leave the door open for a later card to sweep in and negate my move.

I’m finding that when I do poorly in an area control game, whether it’s Mission: Red Planet, Mexica, Tikal, El Grande, etc., I’ve consistently done a poor at choosing my opponents. My biggest fault is choosing to fight too many different opponents simultaneously. I end up getting ‘picked on’ from all players weakening my position on all fronts. If I instead, focussed on only fighting a select few opponents then some will ignore me allowing me more resources to strengthen my position. It seems pretty obvious but I consistently fail at recognizing that I’ve done it yet again.

I’d not remembered the chaotic back-stabbing romp that makes up El Grande but it is a good game. It’s a shame that it has taken us 3.5 years to play it again. I’d like to play it again soon and I promise to myself to choose my battles more wisely.

The end of May is busy with my birthday (yeah 43!), Noah’s birthday (yeah 12!) and our wedding anniversay (yeah 22!) but we did manage to get in a couple of games recently.

Lisa, Noah, and I played Mission: Red Planet. That was the first time I’ve played it with three and the first time for Lisa and Noah. Lisa ran away with the win getting a few good resource draws in areas outside of my bonus card area which I was working hard to meet. I think I like the game with more people. It adds a bit more chaos and more contention on the planet.

The three of us also got in a play of Dos Rios. I received a copy from a BGG trade and it’s sat for almost 6 months. Noah and I really like the game despite the chaos of the river. You cannot play the game thinking that your campesinos are going to stay in the mountains for any length of time. You’ve got to play tactically and aggressively. The downtime during turns can be somewhat severe depending on who you play with but it didn’t seem to be a problem this go around. Noah and Lisa discussed a lot of their turns and in the end I got blocked out of a winning move and was left without an ability to block Noah’s subsequent move granting him the win.

That’s all I’ve got time for right now. I’ll be posting some summary results for the first month of Uberbadger.com and our latest designs. Thanks to the early adopters/customers, sales are pretty respectable for only being in business for such a short time. More on that later.

We met Monday night at Keith’s house for the May 2008 installment of AGN. Thanks for hosting Keith.

We only had four so I was really wanting to break open my copy of the card/trick-taking game Tichu. I’ve owned this game for years and could never quite get it to the table. I’ve tried numerous times with my family with no success and they’re even euchre players!

The game is best played with four playing across the table from your partner. You can play in the same type of setting at euchre and talk over the game play which I appreciate for casual non-gamer friends and family.

We only played four hands to get a feel for the game but I think I made some converts. If you haven’t tried Tichu…grab a copy. You won’t regret it.

The rest of the evening was taken up by Nautilus, the submarine/exploration game I’ve blogged about in the past. It only gets a 6.55 average rating on BGG which is respectable but, for me, it rates higher. I really enjoy the mechanics of buying and placing the research and habitation modules, moving researchers, activating modules, and building up your activation chart enabling you to be more effective in subsequent rounds.

The game does exhibit a fair amount of luck since the position of the good treasures is not known and it takes submarine exploration to recover them. However, the use of your sonar can help mitigate that. In any case, I enjoyed myself as did Rich and Keith. I’m not sure Jason liked it all that much. He tends to not be fond of luck-based games. Or maybe it was the down time between turns which can be large at times.

Note: I replaced the paper money with two sizes of plastic ‘Rubium’ nuggets I bought for my copies of Nexus Ops. Paper money is a pet peeve of mine. I can’t stand the stuff.

Mr. Jack is a two-player game designed by Bruno Cathala and Ludovic Maublanc. The artwork was designed by BGG member Piero Lalune (pierolalune).

The game casts a player in the role of a detective and the other player in the role of Jack the Ripper. The game ends in eight rounds or earlier if Jack escapes the confines of the neighborhood depicted by the board or the detective manages to capture Jack.

The detective has no physical manifestation on the board but instead directs the round characters markers in their movements towards capturing Jack. Jack, on the other hand, does have a physical presence and is represented by one of the characters on the board. Which physical token represents Jack is chosen at the beginning of the game by drawing a card from the Alibi deck (described later) and kept secret by the player playing Jack. It’s the job of the detective to deduce which character is Jack and it’s the job of Jack to escape capture by surviving all eight rounds without being captured or to escape into one of the alleys at the four corners of the board (two of which will always be blocked by police cordons).

The game hinges on a single core feature called witness/no-witness. At the end of each round, the character token representing Jack (known only to the Jack player) is either “in the light or next to another character” or not and the Jack player must announce whether it’s possible for Jack to have been witnessed/seen by another token during that round. The image above shows to characters standing in the hexes adjacent to a lit streetlight and so therefore are visible (in the light). In the upper left hand corner is another unlit streetlight with a purple character token next to it. This character cannot be witnessed since he’s ‘in the dark’. A witness card is turned to the appropriate side (seen/not-seen) depending on whether Jack was witnessed or not during the round. Since the detective is trying to determine which character is Jack, the detective can then eliminate all of the characters that are in the opposite position on the board. Those characters that have been eliminated, have their wooden disks turned over to a less colorful side indicating that these characters are guaranteed not to be Jack.

Each round plays out in the same manner with the exception of the first four rounds where a single lit streetlight is extinguished leaving Jack more and more in the dark. The detective must work quickly in the first four rounds to narrow down his choices since it gets harder and harder to determine as the game progresses.

The game comes with two stacks of sturdy placards. The green stack holds a card for each character (8 cards total). The red stack holds an alibi for each player. As mentioned before, the Jack player draws and secretly holds the identity of the Jack character at the beginning of the game leaving an alibi card for all the remaining players.

At the beginning of each round, four character cards are drawn and turned face up (as depicted in the iconography below the clock tower in the image above). In the order depicted (the overlapping cards – gray is Jack, yellow is the detective), players choose a face up character card and take the action allowed by that character. Each round, one of the players will be able to perform two actions in a row. The character cards allow you to move the character token depicted on the card (at least one space and up to the number of spaces depicted on the card) and in most cases perform a special action. It’s by moving character tokens, using the sewer system to move to other areas of the board quickly, blocking the sewer systems, moving lights, moving police cordons from one alley to another, etc. that allow the detective to force characters into the light or out of the light and for Jack to hide. At the end of each turn there is a call for witnesses and then a light is removed (only the first four turns).

One of the character cards, Sherlock Holmes, allows the player to draw the top alibi card. The alibi card allows the detective to immediately discount one of the characters further whittling away the list of suspects.

In general, the Jack player attempts to group as many characters as possible into either camp (witnessed or not witnessed) in hopes of keeping the detective from being able to discount large groups of suspects each round. Jack cannot escape into a side alley if was witnessed so Jack is always trying to not be witnessed to leave his options open for escape the following round. Sometimes, however, he’s better off staying with a larger group to be witnessed and then making his move in the following round.

With a few games under my belt, it does have it’s moments. However, I doubt I’ll order a copy. One has to be very careful about deciding who and who isn’t witnessed each round. If you make a mistake, it can blow the game making it immediately obvious who Jack is. The rules surrounding Dr. Watson’s light, the lamp post light and being adjacent to another character are straightforward. However, in play it’s easy to call witnessed when you meant not witnessed, and vice versa. Lisa found it difficult to not think of herself as the inspector rather than the detective so she kept discounting his character. In her mind, since she was not playing Jack how could she (thinking of herself as the inspector) be Jack on the board. All of the characters on the board can be Jack and the detective does not have a character on the board.

I’ve found it very difficult to escape so I’m curious if that rarely happens. A situation arose in my last game that illuminated a tactical move for future games. We were in the 6th round and there were two characters left and Jack had not been witnessed in the previous round. I made a run for it using the Jack character leaving him not witnessed but weakening my position in the final round (I was eventually captured). However, the other character was positioned well for making an escape through the sewer.

The game is solid, and does provide a quick 2-player experience that feels a little bit like an adult version of Guess Who. The play feels somewhat repetitive and at times it’s difficult to understand what makes a good move given unknowns in the following round. Solid but not something I would add to my collection.

Uberplay Entertainment announced today that they are ceasing operation effective immediately.

I’m bummed. I’ve been part of a small company that has folded and I know that it’s depressing after putting your heart and soul into something like that. I wish them well in any future endeavors and I’m sad it didn’t work out for them.

The Uberplay titles in my collection are:

• Alhambra
• China
• For Sale
• Hansa
• Metro
• Ra

The print for the board of the ‘Nile’ 2-player variant of Tigris & Euphrates arrived today from CafePress. The custom large poster comes 23″ x 35″ but the board artwork prints only 17″ x 20″ centered. I trimmed the white border off the poster and I’d like to mount it but I think I’ll wait. I’m not satisfied with the color scheme.

The biggest change that I think I need to make is to adjust the hue of the river. I think it’s too green given the color of the blue tiles. Also, the board is relatively dark so I may make some minor adjustments to that as well. I must say, though, that the tiles do have a certain degree of visual pop making it easy to detect patterns without being hindered by the artwork.

I’ve recently gotten T&E back to the table several times after a long hiatus and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. I’ve wanted to introduce the game to Lisa but I wanted to play the game on a smaller board where there would be more competition for kingdoms. In my opinion, T&E’s shines when you’re challenged with working through how conflicts will be resolved and the size of the official 3-4 player board just doesn’t force enough conflict.

So, I dug through the BGG files for T&E and found the 2-player Nile Variant board that had gotten good reviews for the layout. I was all set to attempt to print the board but then decided that the artwork just wasn’t doing it for me. I figured if I was going to pay to have it printed on poster paper, or canvas, or some such thing, I might as well spend some time seeing if I could come up with some artwork that I liked better.

So, below you can see what I came up with and I ordered a custom larger poster print from CafePress. It should come next week so I’ll post an update with the results.

It looks like the storms in Texas may have brought down Board Game Geek. It’s been unavailable since some time during the night. It might prove problematic to get it back up and going in the near future because Aldie is here in Columbus at Alan Moon’s invitation only yearly “Gathering of Friends” for the next week or so. Aldie does a lot of hands on management of the equipment as his full-time job so it’s not like there are teams of people ensuring that the site is functioning properly.

Ah, well. If you were wishing to participate in my “name the game” contest I apologize. It’s bad timing but it’s out of my control. You could always browse the store and buy something while you wait for BGG to come back up :-).

Update: Aldie posted in Google Groups that he’s aware of what’s going on and it looks like it’s an ISP issue.

We met at my house for the April 2008 edition of Analog Game Night. I thought it was going to be a big crowd but at the last minute we had three cancellations so we ended up with a total of six. With six we usually split into two tables so Bob, Rich, and Paul moved to the kitchen table and got started on Torres.

Torres, the so-called 4’th game of the Mask “Trilogy” has passed its prime for me. I’ve played it approximately twenty times since I purchased it and I can’t see myself ever requesting to play it again. It’s not a bad game per se but most of the fun I felt was there originally has leaked out somewhere along the way. The game is a rather methodical exercise in figuring out how to move your knights up, down, around, and through the maze of castles to grab the highest positions on the tallest towers. The king’s bonus and the action cards attempt to spice up the game but in the end, everyone is just trying to figure out the abstract puzzle.

While Torres was getting started on at the kitchen table, Jason, Tim and I set up In the Year of the Dragon in the dining room. This was our first play of “Dragon” and I must say, I was impressed. The first game is always a learning experience and I wish I could always play a new game two or three games back to back to help solidify my thoughts but, alas, that never happens. I made a horrible, horrible blunder on the last turn and miscalculated the effect of the final event of the game: ‘taxes’ (or whatever it’s officially called). I cannot say that I misunderstood that you lose a person for every yuan you cannot pay but I had a major “brain fart” and thought that I would only lose one person. Instead, risking an earlier payment to perform the same action as another player and paying 3 yuan, I had no money when the last event occurred and losing four people totally devastated my palaces. I also took a rather painful hit when decay set in before the round scoring as well. In the end, my final scoring dropped from respectable to downright pitiful. On the good side though, I learned my lesson! Few games capture my desire to play again immediately and Dragon did it. I even found my heart pounding wildly a couple of times during the action selection phase just hoping my opponents wouldn’t choose the option I wanted.

The game is a little tough to describe and it takes a bit of effort to get through the rules for new players so I recommend that teachers practice streamlining the process as much as possible. The game bits comprise a board with two tracks: the victory point and the person tracks, stacks of ‘people’ tiles in various forms (e.g. farmers, doctors, warriors, scholars, tax collectors, etc.), action tiles (9), palace ‘floors’, coins (yuan), privileges, rice tiles, fireworks tiles, individual players cards (11 cards each), event tiles (12 – one for each month in the Year of the Dragon), and a few more minor bits that don’t play a major role in the game. Lots of bits!

Player win by advancing the farthest on the victory point track by game end. Players score victory points throughout the game but there are 12 specific scoring opportunities (once per round where each round represents a month in the Year of the Dragon) and a single end-game scoring based on the items in your personal playing area.

At a high level, players need to build palaces in their personal play area by choosing the ‘build’ action to obtain palace floors (max height of three). They then must populate those palaces by obtaining people and assigning them permanently to a palace (no more than the height of the palace). At the end of every month, an event occurs that is usually pretty damn brutal and you must obtain items in earlier rounds in anticipation of protecting yourself from the event. For example, when drought hits you lose rice tiles for each palace you have and when you run out of rice tiles…the people in your palaces that you’ve worked so hard to get there start dying. Yikes! So, how do you get stuff and how do you make it pay off while protecting yourself from the bad stuff?

Each round/month is divided into four phases: Action, People, Event/Decay, and Scoring. In the Action phase, the nine Action tiles are shuffled and divided into piles that equal the number of players. The position of your token on the person track determines the turn order (farthest ahead to the farthest behind). In person track order, players select a group of action tiles and take one of the actions depicted on one of the tiles in the group. The actions tend to allow the player to garner victory points, firework tokens, rice tokens, money, advance on the person track, build palaces/floors, etc. You are allowed to choose any group of actions but if another player has already chosen that group you have to pay 3 yuan to the bank.

Once actions are complete, players select a card from their individual decks of 11 cards (9 person and 2 wild cards) allowing them to choose one of the 9 types of people from the top edge of the board. You do not get your cards back so choose your people wisely. The chosen person must be assigned to a specific palace in front of you. The people in your palaces tend to adjust the payoff of choosing a specific action the following round. For example, if you choose a ‘rice’ action, you get a rice tile for the action plus rice tiles for any additional farmer tiles you have in your palaces. So you must think a few turns ahead of when you’ll need an item since it may take two rounds to establish the necessary payout.

For every person tile you choose you get to move ahead the indicated number on the person track. Some of the person tiles trigger a larger payout but move you ahead a smaller number. Which person tile you choose can be different in different situations depending what compromises you need to take to affect the change you need.

After people selection is complete, the event for the month occurs. The events are lined up across the bottom side of the board so you can anticipate what will happen and in what order throughout the entire game. The first two months are peaceful (no event) but the following 10 months can be hell. There are sickness tiles which cause you to lose 3 people unless you posses doctors in your palaces to mitigate the plague. There are drought tiles that destroy your rice tiles and people if it comes to that. There are Mongol hoards which attack and alter the victory point track, there are tax tiles that cause you to pay 4 yuan to the bank and they kill some of your people if you can’t pay. The only good tile is a bonus for having the most and second most number of fireworks tiles. A small respite amid the trauma of the event track.

If that wasn’t enough, after the event, decay sets in and destroys a floor of every unoccupied palace. And then, luckily round-end scoring. After 12 rounds, there is a final scoring based on the number of people you managed to retain by game end, the bonus for placing monks in larger height palaces, and the conversion of rice/fireworks tiles into money and then money into victory points.

All in all, I loved the game. I can see that it might get a little methodical and repetitive but the randomness of the 12 events on the event track and the randomness of the way the action cards clump up will hopefully keep the game alive. In any case, I’m going to have fun trying to get tired of it.

Jason and Paul left after the first round of games and the four of us played a round of Mission: Red Planet. I had a much better handle on the use of the cards this time and felt like I at least finished a respectable second. M:RP is a fun romp and can’t be taken too seriously. I’m enjoying it as a ‘closer’ and still look forward to more plays.

Whew! I apologize for the long winded post but it just had to come out. Thanks everybody for coming and I look forward to next game night.

From this article on BoardGameNews, up until yesterday, Hasbro didn’t own the rights to Trivial Pursuit. Instead, over the past twenty years, Hasbro has been paying licensing fees to the original publisher Horn Abbot (owned by the two designers Chris Haney and Scott Abbott and two other lucky dogs). But, as of yesterday, Horn Abbot sold all rights to Hasbro for….wait for it…. eighty “holy mother of all that’s sane in this world” million dollars. Yes…that’s an ‘m’ before the ‘illion’.