Pawnstar

Pawnstar's Potential Playlist.

2012-02-09T13:11:00.000Z

I have a few titles I would really like to get played, just to make sure I like more than just the concept, if for no other reason. Some I have tried before, some I have yet to try. Sometimes it can be a bit difficult finding the right conditions for a particular game. Time is often a factor, but on occasion something else gets in the way:

Vinhos

This rather heavy economic engine is all about Portuguese wine production; from purchasing vineyards, through laying wine down for vintage, to selling your produce at the wine fair. I managed one play with three players after buying this mid-2011. We struggled through the rules; too many exceptions and not the best laid out ruleset are no help, rushing through them to get the game underway is even less help.

To top it all, one of the players in the group keeps turning his nose up at it, some lame excuse about not enjoying it first time around (no names, no pack-drill, but you know who you are, Ian - oops!).

Pret-a-Porter

The theme seems like something out of a chick-flick, however, there have been enough people over on BGG claiming it's a tight, challenging economic engine that I paid attention and recently ordered a copy (to fill the hole that an absence of Eclipse from my Christmas stocking left). With a serious lack of fashion knowledge (I have no idea what "boho" is supposed to be, and my research has left me none the wiser - as in I wouldn't even know it if a supermodel had left it on my bedroom floor), I will probably be left at a disadvantage if playing against females. Then again, maybe not.

The rules seem awfully complicated, but when you filter out the translation difficulties the Polish producers clearly experienced, the game's a pretty straightforward game of worker placement and resource management - just like a number of other titles out there (from mediocre to magnificent). So I just have to try this out very soon, and hope it lives up to the (rather mild) hype.

Homesteaders

I've been eyeing this one up for some time; generally skipping past it in favour of something more frivolous (not on my account so much as the group's). I finally caved in at Leisure Games in London last week (my first visit - an awesome games store reminiscent of how they used to be a quarter of a century ago).

The designer Alex Rockwell has been a prominent contributor on BGG (mainly strategy articles - and good ones at that) for some years; I have every faith that the game will be a good one. The trouble is, I also know it isn't going to appeal to those who prefer the lighter fare; I'm going to have to be careful who I spring this one on.

Merchants & Marauders

If popular opinion is anything to go by, this is "the" pirate game. Well, I have heard of a few which have claimed to be, but this is the first one that seems to deliver the promise fast action and theme in one hefty box. I have my doubts about this one living up to the hype, but I have no doubt it is a game which will be enjoyed. It seems to take a hybrid approach; from reading the rules there are some similarities to Pirates Cove (in terms of the ship ratings), Winds of Plunder (in terms of the variety of action) and old-school games (in terms of combat and random events).

Can M&M fill the gap between Pirates Cove (too light and fluffy) and Blackbeard (too detailed and lengthy) that would suit our gaming group? That remains to be seen (but hopefully not for too long).

Masters of Venice

I looked at this a while back, when the publishers were threatening to release it. I recently acquired a copy, and it looks like this game might just do the job of an 18XX without the railways. Alright, there are huge differences; however, the share dealing in conjunction with the system of trading in goods seems to result in a similar approach of different establishments fluctuating in worth. Controlling interest brings special benefits, of course; however, I don't think there will be any really cut-throat takeovers in this game - running the business into the ground doesn't seem to be an option.

Wasabi

Players try to impress with their sushi preparation, scoring points by fulfilling recipes using ingredients they strategically place on the table. It's a pretty simple theme, and works quite well. Not the first - or indeed the last - game to utilise the food and/or restaurant theme, but looks like it could be one of the better incarnations. A Western game about Japanese food will have to do for me; especially as we have never seen the publication of the Japanese game I saw at Essen once, Chef's Dinner Party (much to my disappointment, I might add).

I could have bought a copy of this game at Essen a few years ago, and probably got it at half the price I paid for this one. Van-loads of games got in the way, though, and it only caught my eye again recently. I think this one will go down well with those who prefer something lighter; I wonder if it will appeal to the heavier gamers too.

To Boldly Go?

2012-01-20T09:46:00.000Z

It should be no surprise that this would eventually happen, however you feel about it. The television series once described as "Wagon Train to the Stars" has been taken, rather appropriately, as the latest theme to be applied to Settlers of Catan.

There seems to be an almost natural transition of the system to the theme, much the same as the concept of the original series. But for those of you who shelled out on a copy of Starfarers of Catan, fear not - this game might as well be the original game - as far as I can tell, the only changes are thematic and not mechanical.

Initial information indicates the settlements are replaced by space stations, roads by starships, the robber by a Klingon ship, and of course, resources, developments and terrain are given a thematic treatment. The only real difference I can tell from what I have seen of this game is the addition of characters from the Federation, who bring additional benefits to players.

So with nothing much changing from the original game, is Catan boldly going where no man has gone before, or is it just following the tired path of the mainstream publications? I mean, Catan has already been applied to several settings - different ages, different histories, a number of cities - how long before we see Simpsons of Catan, Barbie Catan or (God forbid) My Little Pony of Catan?

I don't think we have to worry about that for now; Star Trek is one of the most appealing themes for the game I've seen in a long time, and targets a related (although slightly different) demographic to Starfarers. Despite the knowledge that its differences are mainly thematic, I am looking forward to it; which just goes to show, theme is as important as mechanics for gaming pleasure.

Star Trek Catan is billed to make an appearance around March this year.

Good News?

2012-01-13T15:04:00.000Z

An interesting article on Newslite from just before Christmas, "Families opt for board games over video games", gives clear evidence that the boardgame is far from extinct. Surely it's only a matter of time before the masses realise what has evolved from these "classics"?

The Auction - A Cop-Out?

2011-12-07T09:21:00.001Z

Often used in many a design, the auction mechanism has its uses - a balanced approach to turn order, a system allowing for variance in the value of in-game resources or the core mechanism of a trading game. Lately, the auction mechanism has become the gaffer tape of game design; pulling the loose ends into a neat line. But I have to ask, is it necessary to employ an auction mechanism where something else could have done?

Auctions in their basic form are rather time-consuming game elements; players must make a choice to either raise the bid or drop out, the auction continues until only one player remains and if there is enough competition, the usual approach for the individual is to try and get something way below its estimated value - which prolongs the auction. Much better, in my opinion, to assign fixed prices to actions or commodities; and use some other method of distribution.

Sometimes an auction is the best fit; take Goa for instance, where tiles are bought by auction for the first part of every turn. The economy in Goa is a semi-closed one; cash will usually change hands between players, unless players buy their own tiles or take the taxation action (the value of the ducat increasing or decreasing respectively). A fixed price for every tile would probably result in an even distribution of cash amongst players, which just wouldn't leave any room for manoeuvre and zero inflation. The auction, once-around with the auctioneer getting the last option on the sale, works very well in stimulating both.

In some games, the auction is the game itself with everything else being incidental. The best example of this would be Modern Art; it is a game made up of a series of auctions, all of which behave differently in some way. Like Goa, money tends to be exchanged between players, with the in-game circulation (and hence the relative value) changing when players buy whatever they're selling.

In other games, however, the auction sits uncomfortably as a workaround solution for something the designer seemed unable to implement for themselves. Trust me, I'm not saying this like it's a bad thing - but it is not always the most suitable approach; especially where the result of an auction is difficult to introduce any sort of balance into.

A case in point would be the turn order auction in Age of Steam. Don't get me wrong, the game is brilliant, but when the game was reimplemented as Steam and the (Base Game) turn order auction dispensed with, I found it greatly improved. The trouble with these auctions for, say, turn order is that quite frequently another method would have worked much more effectively. The choice of how the game will work has been passed from designer to player - and the course of the game is decided upon the auction. In Age of Steam, this means the auction winner is usually the player who could best afford to pay; and as a result he would be in an even better position to pay (provided, of course, he knows which special action he ought to be taking).

That is a lot of weight to put on a single game element, and in the case of Steam I think Martin Wallace made the right choice in dispensing with what was an unnecessarily dominant mechanism. I suppose, for me at least, that's the problem I have with the auction as a mechanism; if it isn't properly reined in then it will take over the game.

There's a really fun game from Zoch called Manila; for the most part, it's all about risk and speculation, and I have never played a game where I wasn't having a laugh. However, as a game more than an experience, it's rather below par. At the start of every round, a harbour master is chosen by auction, with the high bidder taking the role. The harbour master has the privilege of deciding which boats will leave with which cargo, thus exerting some influence on which commodities can increase in value. He also has the privilege of being the sole player capable of buying a share. Thus, the game relies heavily on whoever wins the harbour master auction; and if the same player can manage this again and again, they're highly likely to win the game. If I wasn't having so much fun playing, this flaw would be a real issue; it's a poor use of an auction mechanism, but I don't think the auction can ever be described as a quick fix in a game which would attain more balance if every player got to be harbour master at least once.

Perhaps I have nothing to moan about? I mean, I wouldn't consider the auction as overused, and there is enough variety in the auction that I cannot really complain on the grounds of monotony. In fact, when you think about it, a lot of games out there follow a model which is nothing more than an auction in disguise. The Speicherstadt is a case in point - quite a clever case in point as it happens. Players place workers next to actions in a kind of stack or queue; then the player placing first has the option of paying a price for the action based upon the number of "bids" or worker placements. Refusal lowers the price for the next player, with a single remaining worker gaining it for the minimum.

As different as it is, the worker placement in Speicherstadt is still an auction, as much as the fixed price bidding in Amun Re can be described as an auction. But if we take any economic or resource game and break down its elements, it's hard to find something that doesn't resemble an auction in some way, without actually being an auction; so it cannot be that hard to avoid using a straight auction mechanism as a solution. When all is said and done, the auction is a useful means of putting in-game value on something of indeterminate benefit; but if you're going to design a game, I would recommend you consider other options first rather than leaving it to the players to decide. That would be a cop-out.

All Work and No Play

2011-11-05T08:51:00.000Z

The Balance Between Complexity and Playability

Game design is a delicate procedure if you want to do it properly. There are various pitfalls to overcome; how much player balance is required, how much chaos needs to be introduced to achieve this, how pure you want the strategic elements to be and so on. Mostly you're trying to utilise abstract and quantifiable elements to create something that can be called a "game". How well you do this makes the difference between pastime and game; you can quite easily throw a trail of spaces between two points, a die and some tokens and you'll have a roll-and-move race; but this is more a pastime than a game.

One of the greatest problems involves theme as much as anything else; you want to represent something in a game which adds depth and interest, and is relevant to the theme. If it's a game about, say, managing a football team this might be the transfer market, or the football matches themselves; if it's a game about politics this might be the vote, or indeed canvassing for votes.

However, with every new element you add to a game design, you're opening a whole new can of worms. Unfortunately, it's usually a can of worms you cannot do without - if you don't fish out a few ideas, you might as well go back to roll-and-move.

And there's the rub; because as soon as you add something to the game to make it interesting you are by default making it more complex than it was before. More to the point, if you want the design to work properly, you're probably going to have to change or tweak something else in the game structure to accommodate the extra complexity. If you thought that would be an end to it, you then have to ensure that once this element has been introduced, it doesn't diminish the game's playability.

The experience of playing reflects a games playability - an indeterminate feature of any game which can be described as the difference between work and play. This abstract concept is something you can only really feel while playing the game, and is likely to be different from player to player. For instance, somebody who is excited by 1830 may not necessarily be excited by Age of Steam, and vice-versa. As you add more complex elements to your game design, your audience will shift; that's one reason why our hobby is niche - most "ordinary" people don't graduate from Draughts or Monopoly. The calibration within our hobby is much narrower; there are those with a taste for "light and fluffy" and those with a taste for "heavy and mechanical". I tend towards the latter, but am one of the few who appreciates both.

The problem of how complex to make your game is, therefore, completely dependent upon your audience; but whatever the level of complexity, the game has to be playable. This is true no matter the target audience; you don't want them to be bogged-down with calculations you would have to get an accountant in for; nor do you want the game to seem more like something you should be paying the players to do.

So how do you maintain a balance between the two? There is a simple answer; use your own tastes to guide you. If you're designing games then you've probably played enough to know what you like. You will know where your limits are as far as complexity is concerned, and you also know what will bore you to death (or at least bore you enough to cull the game). If you feel the need to introduce something else to the game, make sure it's not already covered elsewhere (in the abstract or otherwise); if it is, leave it; if it isn't, ask yourself how necessary it is (and trust me, "want" often equates to "necessary").

Can I Have a Drum Roll, Please?

2011-11-02T10:48:00.000Z

A friend of mine managed to get over to Essen this year; something I didn't lament missing because of cost, but from what I've seen and heard this year seems to be one of the best. There have been some fantastic games published, but like any good year, particular titles far outshine the rest.

A case in point would be Drum Roll, a circus-themed game which has received a lot of attention - and in my opinion deserves even more. I got to play it last night, and I have to say, I enjoyed it immensely. Despite using the same old tired mechanics of the worker-placement and resource-gathering economic engine, this game is exciting. You see, it's not so much what is done in a game; rather it's how it's done which makes it more interesting.

In Drum Roll, players are circus owners, all vying to make a success of their "Greatest Show on Earth". They compete for performers, who they then employ and try to polish their performances through training, rehearsal, props, costumes, and other elements to increase the quality of an act. These elements form the "resource" part of the game; to me there could be no better way of reflecting that aspect of the theme. The more polished an act, the better it is and the more (yes, you guessed it) "prestige" a circus gains. However, here's the rub; performers bring benefits as irregular acts which they cannot when fully and properly employed (they are flipped to give the circus prestige, and any additional benefit gained from their performance is lost in this exchange).

The circus can also employ other personnel, who bring different benefits every turn. For instance, a show organiser will alter the turn order, an agent will change the available resources and a concert band raises prestige with every show.

Each circus performs three shows during the game, each taking place after a (slightly variable) number of rounds. When the show is performed, benefits are gained for each act; but they must also be paid, of course; unpaid acts bring down your prestige as a circus owner. Players will also score bonus prestige for supplying acts which are of particular appeal to the location in which they hold the circus; which changes with every show, as you would expect. After three shows, a final scoring is made based upon how many acts a circus has, their type of act and their quality.

The underlying mechanics are well honed, the theme is appealing and the presentation is good (it's not excellent because although the good-quality player mats are attractive, they are a touch flimsy and oversized). In all, this is a great game and I want a copy. This is certainly the best of the Essen crop so far; other worker placement games of recent years (such as Leonardo Da Vinci and Fresco; which both left me cold) pale into insignificance compared to this one. That sort of accolade puts this at the top of my wants list.

Forget 'Em Not!

2011-10-07T11:11:00.001+01:00

Last night, after a rather odd game of Ra (remind me never to play with the full complement - far too chaotic), four of us at Chippenham Games Club settled down to a game of Die Haendler (recently reissued by Z-Man - apparently with some improvements). For those of you unfamiliar with this beautiful game, Die Haendler is a game about trading and negotiation, in which players buy goods, send them to other cities on carts and sell them on for profit. This profit is then used to buy and maintain a higher social status. It looks very pretty, with its crafted pieces, shaped goods and almost-tile playing cards; but underneath this serene and attractive exterior is one of the most cut-throat games you'll ever play.

But, I digress; the point is, I once again tried to educate other people in a game I thought I knew the rules to, only to find I had forgotten some really key rules. This isn't early onset Alzheimer's or anything; it's just a matter of a gap of around eight years or so since I last played. And worse of all, I thought I still knew how to play. This created a few problems:

1. I had to find solutions to allow the game to continue, having forgot rules which should have been properly implemented at the start.

2. I carried out actions which were against the rules, throughout the course of the game.

3. I came in last place.

Alright, none of this is really surprising; but for a game I thought I knew, I was really shocked at how much I'd forgotten. For instance, the complexities of the rules of Chess reasonably outweigh those present in Die Haendler, yet I can still remember the rules. I haven't played Chess in a very long time, either. Perhaps a better example would be Kingmaker, a game I last played in 1985 or 1986 (the exact year escapes me); I would be able to set this up tomorrow and play without error, especially after a quick rules recap.

So what is it that made me so forgetful? Surely it cannot be short-term memory loss, because we're talking about something I played some time ago (although I did review the rulebook more recently)? Maybe I was never attentive enough when I used to play it, which seems odd, as it's one of my favourites of all time? No, it has to be something else, and right now the only thing I can think of is that I was pushed for time to get the game underway.

Of course, none of this saves me the embarrassment of my losing a poorly-taught game; but at least I lost in style - after rising higher than the other players, I took myself back down to Peasantville in the very last turn. There has to be another outing for this one; I aim to try it with the new, Z-Man rules. I'll let you know how it goes.

Pointing and Giggling

2011-10-06T16:37:00.000+01:00

We all do it; the AT-gamer guffaws at the Eurogamer's happy game, the Wargamer sniggers at the AT-gamer's plastic toy soldiers, the Eurogamer chuckles at the Wargamer's excessive complexities, and all three laugh heartily at the RP Gamer's penchant for cute elves, dainty halflings and nasty goblins.

And why? Because at the end of the day we all like to think what we're doing is the best way to do it.

It's a psychological echo of our childhood. Remember the time you went to school with that odd-looking bag, only to find another child's mother had one just like it and how the other children laughed at you? Remember when you were still wearing those flared trousers and platform shoes when everybody else had the latest fashion, and how the other children laughed at you? Remember? Perhaps you were one of the other, grubby kids, or even worse, you were the kid who didn't make it to the toilet?

As we get older, it manifests in other ways; who's driving the best car, watching the best programmes on television, hanging with the best people. For gamers, it's all about who's playing the best games. And I know it's a matter of opinion, but it's not going to stop me pointing and laughing at others playing games such as Heroscape, Chaos in the Old World, Nuclear War, ASL and Magic. In the meantime, I'll try and think of a way to make little wooden cubes, animals and people look manly, to avoid receiving similar treatment.

But let's face it, if we're really into something, we don't care who is jeering, or even what they're jeering about; because experience has taught us that we can easily pick holes in their lifestyle, their hobbies and their attire if need be, just to remove all focus from ourselves.

So let's hear it for pointing and giggling; it belongs as much in the gaming world as anywhere else, and manifests stereotypes from which we can measure our preferences.

Dominant Submission

2011-09-09T11:46:00.000+01:00

As if we didn't play enough evolution-themed games, I got to play Dominant Species (DS) for the first time a few weeks ago. I have yet to find the inherent randomness or lack of control that some have complained about; there always seems to be a way out of a situation for any species, as our first outing with this game demonstrated.

While it could be said the environmental counters might leave a particular animal group struggling against complete extinction, arguably this is the crux of the game; your species must adapt to changes in the environment to go forward. But the best games of this type always exploit some dichotomy; in the case of DS, an animal group is going to be more successful if it becomes less adapatable.

This is because of the way scoring works in the game; if your adaptations match a particular environment counter, then they multiply against the number of that counter in any particular area to give a score. This score also reflects which species are dominant in that particular region (so it's kind of the whole point of the game).

I'd like to play this again some time, but with others decrying the playing time, it looks less likely with every session. I have heard that every species has to be played differently, and I would be interested to find out how close to the truth that is.

Expanding Experience

2011-09-06T16:24:00.000+01:00

I have always been disappointed when buying a game only to find I'm required to buy something else in order to play. This usually means more time wasted before play, more expenditure before play and something which never quite gives you what you expected when it finally comes to the crunch. This disappointment is one of the reasons the miniatures hobby is now an image in my rear-view mirror; it's something I can enjoy, but not something I'm willing to work at enjoying.

A natural progression from this is my distaste for expansion sets. I can understand expansions which have been brought out to provide extras to a certain extent (for example, new armies for wargames which, had they been included in the original box, would have necessitated owners to take a few gym sessions prior to purchase); however, even these make me wonder at times.

One aspect of expansions which really puts me off them is those which are designed purely as fixes for the original game. It's a fair point that not all problems can be fixed during a play test, but if consumers are forced to buy an extra box of stuff just to get a single fix out of it, then one has to ask why the game was issued in the first place? The publisher, the developer and quite possibly the designer have not done their homework; either that or they're just not that bothered about pleasing their customers.

Another negative take is the way some game ideas are milked - until the cash-cow is barren, in some cases - with the introduction of expansion after expansion for the sake of expansions. I truly believe that while this business model might work with many sub genres within the gaming hobby, boardgames is not one of them. This is because I believe the type of person who gravitates towards boardgames above all other types of games is usually the type of person who wants something self-contained; limited by its own box, if you will. I mean, how many really successful collectible boardgames have you seen?

The biggest problem I have with most expansions comes from the cost-benefit ratio; which, let's be honest, hardly ever reaches whole numbers. I find it very difficult to justify buying an expansion for more than two-thirds the price of the original game, only to be given a few more counters and/or a small deck of cards; all of which are, of course, fairly useless without the original game. The worst offenders are those which come in a box the same size as the original, with around half the components of the base game rattling around it; and give you the benefit of a couple of new rules which are often less effective than a simple house rule would have been - without all the clag and expense in the extras.

And looking back with a more frugal perspective, I can think of very few exceptions that can be described as completely worth the time and money spent on it. That's a lot of expansions which, in my opinion, don't fully deliver; but to be fair, there are very few that are so dire they will never come into contact with the main game.

You may be asking yourselves what brought all of this on? Well, it's been on the cards for a while, and oddly enough it was cards that were the last straw. I got hold of a copy of a Small World expansion, Tales and Legends of Small World. It's a deck of cards with different events on it that introduce several other tactical possibilities to the game; usually in the form of some universal penalty or benefit applying to particular in-game circumstances. The trouble I have with this, is a lot of the effects are something which I would have thought better suited new races and powers rather than random events. I also have a problem with the random part of course; although there are a few design hints with a view towards using particular card sets for theme or level of chaos. It doesn't seem to be a poor expansion by any means, and is well worth £5-£8.

And there's my problem; it costs £12. Twelve pounds sterling for what amounts to a fancy deck of cards, and an average game expansion. I feel like I've been mugged in broad daylight. I will definitely have to get some play out of this deck, just so feel I got some worth for my expenditure. One might argue this is a good, reasonable price for something which might make up half of the box-contents of some games; well, two wrongs don't make a right, as the saying goes, and just because I accept it when one publisher adds invisible worth (justifiably in some cases) to something that probably cost less than £1 to manufacture doesn't mean I have to accept it across the board. Besides, expansions always need the base game.

Almost always. There are, of course, those game expansions which also behave as stand-alone games. Oddly enough, Small World Underground is a good example; and I want it!

Back on track, however, I've decided to share my thoughts on some of the expansions I have bought, played or just had sight of - good and bad:

Age of Empires III 6-Player Expansion: Just pieces to add a sixth player to the mix, nothing more. I got exactly what I asked for, so the expansion is fine - as long as you like the base game. I can take it or leave it.

Age of Steam (various map expansions): Such expansions are necessary if you want to add variety to a game such as this; prolonged play over the years by various gamers has shown that certain maps suit a certain number of players, or even a certain type of player. My advice is not to buy too many; though I understand the completist mentality, there just isn't any need for, say, beginner's maps like France (if you want to learn a cut-throat game then it's no good playing on a nice, easy board) or maps designed specific players (I don't have any two-player maps and cannot imagine playing it with that number).

BattleLore - A Call to Arms (and perhaps a few others): I can understand releasing new armies and creatures for this game; but this is clearly something which should have been integral to the original game. Actually, I think some of the others could have been better, or again incorporated, so I probably won't buy any of those.

Carcassonne (various): If ever a game extracted the urine with the expansion market, this has to be the one. For a three-figure sum you can have everything you can attach to the base game and confuse your friends in the bargain.

A Game of Thrones (all three expansions): A corrective rule about ports which could have been implemented in the base game by house-ruling; but mostly these expensive expansions added something interesting. Naturally, the upcoming second edition of the base game incorporates the best bits, which makes you wonder why they weren't there in the first instance. Irritating in many respects (replacement decks irritate me however good or bad - replacement cards that don't even come close to the deck they're supposed to be part of are even worse), but good.

Settlers of Catan 5-6 Player Expansion: If this game was ever intended to seat more than four, they should have included the required extra equipment in the box. It wasn't, which is why this expansion turns it into something considerably less settling.

Zooloretto (various): The expansions I have experienced in this game are such a good fit, it feels like the publishers have took a complete game and broken it down just to make more from the consumer. It's a great way to make somebody pay double or more for a complete game which should have gone for a single game price.

Race for the Galaxy (various): If you thought (as I do) that £12 for a deck of cards was a bit steep, try this game for size. You can play the base game, but that hints at there being more to the game - which requires the purchase of the expansions. Alright, at least there's some tie-in from the original game; but you don't realise until after you've played it once or twice that you're not playing with a full deck. At £20 for a slack handful of cards, I am not sure I'm getting my money's worth.

Power Grid (various): One of the most excellent games of the 20th Century, with some excellent expansions out there. Expansions are usually just different maps, some good some bad; however, the introduction of the alternate plant cards changes the face of the game enough to make even the original map fresh.

Cosmic Encounter (various, for various editions): I don't know why I bother; in just about every version of this game I have played, I have found no reason not to just stick with what's available in the base game. And again, £20 for a deck of cards just doesn't cut it. I still bought them, but hey, nobody's perfect.

Puerto Rico Expansion: I've owned this for about half the time I've owned PR, and while it adds a touch of variety in the available buildings, it doesn't really do anything much for the game to make things play differently. I would have expected "official" rules for an extra player at least. Unless you're a PR die-hard, the expansion offers very little; for die-hards, why would you bother with such an expansion anyway?

Ticket to Ride: Things were going well with expansions for this game; but they had to go down the route of producing standalone games which were just too similar for me to justify ownership. Besides which, I didn't really get on with this game, though I could tolerate it. The Alvin & Dexter expansion just annoyed me; I was glad at that point to be a former owner of the base game.

7 Wonders Leaders: If any game lends itself to expansion, 7 Wonders does; but why did it have to be Leaders? I think we're talking a severe luck-of-the-draw advantage here; some leaders are just too powerful, and if you're lucky enough to get a particular leader then you're off to a good head-start. My biggest gripe is this being yet another example of high cost for low output; I am also a little put off by reported mismatching (though I've not really noticed myself).

Ys+: An example of an expansion that turned a relatively bland game into something a bit more playable and enjoyable; so where was it when the original came out? Too many fixes are afterthoughts, but to be fair, in this case at least, they're not fixes - just afterthoughts.

Warrior Knights - Crown and Glory: What a great idea it was to get Bruno Faidutti to turn the old-school GW classic into something a little more open to the modern gaming market. What a bad idea it was to try and shorten it a bit more during development. Bruno had the ideal solution; add length to the game by putting more influence in the pool. FFG just brought out an expansion, em[ploying a combination of unnecessary additions and elements that should have been present in the base set. The enhancements which are most usable in Crown and Glory add hours to the game; fine for us epic gamers, but bad news if you would rather play something in one evening.

Cuba - El Presidente: Never played the game with it, and I doubt I ever will. One of those expansions which to me seems unnecessarily priced for too little enhancement. I can tell all of this just by looking at the box.

Agricola - Farmers of the Moor: Not my favorite worker placement game, mainly because your result is frequently dictated by whether or not you were dealt a good hand at the start of the game. But still it's a good game, which doesn't need confusing expansions that cost as much as a new game. Simply keep the money and get a new game.

Elfenland - Elfengold: The introduction of an auction mechanic and economy adds some depth, more strategy and greater choice to Elfenland; it also adds a couple of hours to the play time. Once was enough; some like it that way, but each to his own.

Dixit 2: Apparently this can be played as a stand-alone game and not just with Dixit, which garners it some points. However, I'm back to talking about costs again, and essentially we're talking another deck of cards for £20-£30. It's a brilliant game, though; no question of that.

Naturally, not all expansions bring out the curmudgeon in me; those that generally pass give added value in some way. Curiously enough, I can't think of many...

Imbalance of Power

2011-07-14T14:22:00.001+01:00

I thought you might like to hear about a design I'm working on.

I have long enjoyed and admired The Game of Nations (TGoN) as a fairly abstract representation of Middle-East politics and the oil interest. I still consider it one of the few "old school" titles which stands up well amongst modern strategy games; but there are one or two issues with it which have been brought to the fore by others. One of the main downsides, which often leaves a bad taste for proponents of the modern game, is the concept of player elimination; which leads on to another characteristic of the game, in that it generally ends up as a drawn-out two-player match once the initial elimination is out of the way.

I set about trying to compensate for these shortcomings a few years ago, tweaking the rules of the base game, but this was to no avail. The only real solution I could reach was to shorten the endgame significantly, and even then it is a bit hit-and-miss because players must make a judgement call as to whether it is worth continuing the game beyond the fixed point of the last elimination.

Another game I found interesting over two decades ago was Superpower (SP), a Games Workshop product from happier times. The theme is well-represented, with players exploiting Third-World nations in four regions of the World, first by providing economic support then military support (in the form of appropriate influence markers). The game also used propaganda (and propaganda wars would break out frequently), and an abstract commodity known as "World Opinion" - which was lost when carrying out actions and counted towards the victory conditions. Where SP suffered as a game was the lack of any real control. Just about every action was dice-driven; which made it an interesting journey with an unknown destination.

I decided some time ago that it would be good to combine the best of both, and Imbalance of Power was born; that being my working title for the resultant game. Version 0.1 consisted of a board divided into fictional nations. Each nation was divided into regions, roads and cities; regions would contain resources, such as oil, minerals and grain (a la Supremacy, not a game I was trying to assimilate by any means); cities would allow particular actions to be carried out by moving a leader onto them (like the leaders would move in Game of Nations - at a cost), and roads simply connected cities and divided regions. Players would place economic influence in nations to place advisers; depending upon advisor types, a number of actions could be chosen, either paid for by the players or by the nation. Players would receive resources in order of priority - the player with the most economic influence in the region gaining first choice and so on. Resources could also be bought and sold on a market, the price fluctuating according to supply and demand. Military support could be given to a nation on a one-for-one swap of economic influence, and if war broke out between two nations (usually because one player wanted it) forces would move onto regions, roads and cities - effectively blocking their use.

That first draft had some problems. It was difficult to balance the resource values against economic and influential values (as well as against each other). The initial board design was very busy and irrecoverably imbalanced. The player choices were overcomplicated by the convoluted decision-tree that the choice of actions produced. Most of all, things just didn't fit cleanly together. I decided more abstraction was needed.

I now have a playtest-ready copy of v0.2. The board has been abstracted into something not too dissimilar to that used in TGoN. Eight points on a circle form a "Nation"; but in this game each player can place and move one advisor around these points. Unlike TGoN, there are no connecting arrows to neighbouring nations because the advisers stay in the nation they are assigned to. Each Nation is effectively a rondel, with each space on the rondel representing a single "Player Action"; ranging from the economic to the clandestine.

Within this circle is the "Capitol", divided into different "Offices", between which the Nation's "Leader" moves, allowing particular "Leader Actions" to be taken by players. One such Office is the "Department of Defence", in which "Armies" are raised. An appropriate action in the "Foreign Office" allows a declaration of war, permitting cross-border movement by that Nation's Armies. Armies invading occupy spaces, which must then be skipped (I haven't decided yet whether players will still have to count them as part of their movement - but then, that's why the playtesting is required).

Only oil is produced in this version (much like TGoN); this has been for me a welcome simplification and allowed me to easily rationalise the value of the economic unit, an army and the oil itself. This also means, while I still have to finalise details regarding scoring, having the most oil is an easy measure of player success.

So before I start tweaking for best effect, I now need to sort out a few core elements:

Scoring - oil scores by quantity, but extra scores for presence and potential oil yield need to be finalised.
Set-up - having decided on a basic set-up, I now need to work through a couple of playtests to set a point where I feel the game ought to start. Then I need to introduce a fair method for setting up the game so that no player is overpowered (or underpowered, even).
Game End - with a basic model that directly effects how the game flows, I need to pick a fixed end-point. My basic idea is to play up to a fixed number of oil units being produced, then ending the round; my problem is ascertaining where that point ought to be. Essentially, have to find the sweet-spot for the endgame.
Scaling - I'm going to be initially playtesting with four players, but I want the game to fit between two and six players if possible. Additionally, I need to find the best number of nations to use for each number of players - I have consider twice the number of players, double the number of players minus one, two more than the number of players and one more than the number of players. This will need some thought, some work and some testing.

So there you have it. Most of my testing has been in the rather static environment of solitaire play by me, the designer; future playtesting will be in the more dynamic environment of a critical group. I'll let you know of any progress I make.

If It Ain't Broke...

2011-07-11T15:17:00.001+01:00

It's an impossible argument to win when you're trying to persuade somebody that a certain level of realism may do nothing for a game; especially when they've managed to convince themselves otherwise!

It seems to happen more and more frequently; a player picks up a copy of Memoir 44, Tide of Iron or some other heavily abstracted system, and then tries to bolt on extra rules to cover armour differences or unit specifics not covered by the rules.

It's not that I mind people changing rules to give themselves the best results; however, if somebody is allowed to change a system beyond the basic, then they're going to end up with something that barely resembles the original - at best, the resultant system is going to play slowly! There's also the added risk of introducing an untested rule that throws others out of balance.

So, as I see it, if the changes are going to be too heavy it's time to look for an alternative.

Widely Eclectic Tastes?

2011-06-22T10:30:00.022+01:00

I've noticed lately that I don't really stick to a single genre with respect to just about anything artistic or cultural. In film, I can equally enjoy a well-made and thought-provoking drama, and a gory, grainy, darkly comedic slasher flick. In reading, I get roughly the same pleasure from a plain-spoken storyline or a flowery allegory. Music I enjoy ranges from the complex orchestration of Holst's Planets Suite, through the concept album Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys, to the Grunge prologue that was The Pixies.

The same seems to be true when it comes to games; I find I get as much pleasure from a quick ten minute dice challenge, a one hour family strategy, two to three hours of tension, or a day-long strategic epic. In fact, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to pinpoint which genre of game draws my particular attention over and above all others.

If you had asked me about this a few years back, I'd have stated instantly that nothing can top Age of Steam - or even equal it. These days, well it's high up on the list, but there are enough other games I would put as high. Well, not quite; but given the correct circumstances there are better choices.

It's fairly ironic that, given how more accepting I am of the wider range of genres these days, I find I am rejecting games for the slightest similarity to something I prefer. Yes, I have managed to reduce my collection significantly and intend to go even further; my reasoning for this was discussed at length elsewhere. But what can possibly lead to my rejecting games generally accepted as excellent, even by me, within their niche genres?

The answer is fairly simple; excellence does not necessarily equate to superiority. Additionally, I don't necessarily agree with others' vews of excellence, but that's not really relevant here. Of course, the underlying reason my collection is slowly shrinking is that it's very difficult to let go of excellence; it's fairly difficult to let go of something only moderately good, let alone brilliant! However, whereas in the old days the quest for the best was often a hit-and-miss affair of buying and playing games, these days there are many more resources for me to develop an opinion before I make that purchase.

I digress; this post is about my changing tastes as opposed to the size and quality of my collection (although arguably that statement lists both cause and effect). There are so many different situations which might arise at, say, your gaming club; each usually requires a different choice of game. Having games to choose from is, therefore, quite important; but I don't really want to have to choose between similar titles. So what I'm really after is the best in each niche; the problem I face is how to sensibly decide upon the parameters

For instance, there is no way I am going to lose either Age of Steam or Steam from my collection; AoS is clearly the superior auction-based rail game with pick-up and deliver; Steam is clearly the superior non-auction-based rail game with pick-up and deliver. Furthermore, one could, in a sense, consider any of the games in this series to be expansions of the other (despite that not necessarily being the case). This means Volldampf is staying; because it's different enough despite being a precursor to the whole AoS series and carrying some of the core mechanisms. And yet, I consider the 18XX series too similar to each other in many ways; am I wrong? Possibly, but then if a core game approach had been used for Tresham's classic, instead of releases being stand-alone, I would probably want to keep more of them.

When it came to Le Havre, it was just a little too much like, say, Caylus for me to consider it as a necessary title. To be fair, I probably feel the same about Agricola; but I still have that, and still deliberate over whether or not it should be on my trade pile. Perhaps the fact I hardly ever play my copy should be enough to persuade me, but then again I seem to remember it as being my only farming game - that might be enough reason to keep it. Perhaps I'm just making excuses, and perhaps I really ought to shed a few hundred more games before I find a reason to keep them.

At any rate, I still have a taste in games that some people find different. I seem to cross all genres, sub-genres and specific niche groups in my preferences. I don't actively indulge in all genres; for instance I have not played an RPG for well over a decade, wargames opportunities are rare, the longer and more involved boardgames are unsuitable for most sessions and party games (like Werewolf for instance) I generally leave for parties. Notwithstanding, I take great interest in particular titles from them all; I will eventually get to play Here I Stand (and no other game sufficiently details the Reformation period with such grandeur), I will play TI3 again when the opportunity arises, Combat Commander will see the light of day at least once more, Steam goes from strength to strength (despite the fact I don't want to dilute its flavour by pushing it on the group too often) and there's always a good card game to slip in after that.

Just because I have a penchant for one game of a particular type, it doesn't mean I go for the whole genre.

Dicey Designs

2011-06-20T11:19:00.000+01:00

The use of dice in strategy games has for a long time brought tears to the eyes of purists. There are those who still deny Backgammon status as an abstract strategy, simply because of the tactical element introduced by dice. They are perhaps one reason why the classic Campaign, printed by Waddingtons in the 1970's, had limited appeal - despite the clearly strategic movement of armies and generals.

Let's face it, the reason dice are so frowned upon is that they are random. To many a "serious" gamer, the mere sight of this pariah of strategic play is enough to turn them away from a game which, potentially, could be a winner.

Potentially.

Over the last decade or so, there have been interesting alternative uses of dice in games of strategy. Sure, they usually introduce a tactical element; however, the overall tactical influence is usually minimal in the best examples. For the purposes of this discussion, I am choosing to ignore games in which dice are permanently used as something other than random elements - that is to say, they are used to indicate variance in the state of something (as in Iron Crown Enterprise's Fellowship of the Ring - units were represented by dice, the side displayed representing the unit's readiness or stance).

Let's take a look at Railroad Dice (RRD), for example. Every turn, players roll a number of dice. These dice may then, according to the sides which emerge, be used to buy shares, build track and place stations. Dice with track symbols uppermost are placed on the board to represent track being built. Clearly there is some element of chance involved in RRD, which pushes the game into a semi-tactical niche; however, as with most games of this type, it is mitigated. Players are permitted to utilise extra dice from their own supply to increase the chances of getting a symbol they are after.

Ultimately, the difference between dice turning a game into a game of chance and dice being a chaotic-but-manageable mechanism depends entirely upon how they are employed in the game. Whilst RRD might restrict actions to a certain extent, the dice employ "wildcards", which can be used as any of the other types; this means it's highly likely you won't get everything you want, but you will get something. Thus, an overall strategy can be approached. The mechanism is utilised in a fashion which allows for meaningful decisions; not just during the turn, but for the long-term game. Despite this, ultimately, assuming every player makes the optimal choice based upon what is available, the game will come down to who gets the best rolls.

Yspahan is another game in which, for me, this aspect is even more prevalent. A large number of dice are rolled, allocated to various actions according to a strict hierarchy, a set chosen by each player during the turn and one of three possible actions taken (placement/collection, movement or drawing a card). In my experience, the strategies are so obvious, the dice make the game. The last option, drawing a card, is usually the last choice; the action you take because there's nothing better going on. If a player can make a placement to score, it's a no-brainer; not only does he score, he prevents somebody else scoring there. Movement of the "bailiff" (not sure of his name in this one, but he basically penalises another player) benefits everybody but the targetted player (who may himself benefit, as points are given for joining caravans); for that reason it takes second place to the placement option. Again, not a bad game at all; but certainly very tactical, and not removed enough from the blind chance of the dice-roll for my tastes.

There are, of course, improvements on this type of system. The first of this type I came across was Kingsburg; it's not a far cry from Yspahan, however each player has his own dice, which are used in a variation on worker placement. Members of the King's court may be influenced, by one player only (exception: possession of the King's Envoy allows a second placement), in order to gather resources for building, soldiers for defence of the city, victory points or some special action. As every player can see what every other player has rolled, the play can be a little tactical; but ultimately players are making their choices based on their strategic choices for what to build. Particular buildings give special benefits and bonuses; the Church, for example, allows rolls totaling seven or less to be rerolled. Blind chance might force a player behind in this game, but the King's envoy and other benefits are provided to assist the trailing player.

In a similar fashion, Troyes utilises dice for worker placement; in this case the "workers" are represented by pieces other than dice, but dice are required to place them. The twist with Troyes, quite an interesting twist, is that you get to use other player's dice - for a price, of course! The problem with a system like this is that unless you roll well yourself, you're almost certainly going to be down on your cash and/or influence - whether you need to buy somebody else's dice or attract others into buying yours completely depends on how good your dice come up! For me this makes the spread of probabilities a touch too great for my tastes; players tend to be guided tactically by what dice are available, and hence the way forward is often situationally influenced.

For some games, situational influences are a good thing; War of the Ring (WotR), for example, utilises dice as representative of strategic opportunities. In this game, one side plays Sauron and his armies, whilst the other plays the Free Peoples of Middle Earth. In a fashion not too dissimilar to RRD, the dice are rolled and used to perform different functions. Unlike RRD, the dice are recycled. Dice can allow a military action, the search for the ringbearer or a change in the political stance of one of the nations involved. That's all there is to them; they're unlikely to affect the strategic outcome, unlike, say, who controls Isengard, Minas Tirith or Helm's Deep - that's something the ordinary, non-specialised dice are used for!

When all is said and done, the only conclusion I can reach is that dice have a lot in common with fire; they make a good servant and a poor master. When dice dominate, the result is frequently a game that plays you; and nobody likes to be played.

Fluffy Vikings?

2011-06-15T15:39:00.000+01:00

There are quite a few games in my collection which have not yet been played; recently, I've been making the effort to rectify this. Often it's not as easy as it sounds; somebody may have already played it and taken a dislike to it.

A case in point was my selection for last night's session, Graenaland. Designed by Vlaada Chatvil and printed by Altar a few years ago, I have frequently brought it along to sessions since I bought a copy back in 2007. Every time it has been passed over; for something more familiar, something folk are more excited about or because one of the group had played it elsewhere and expressed his unwillingness to play.

Finally, after almost four years, I got it played last night. I thought it would be average, and I'm unhappy to say I was right. We were only playing with three, and the rules do advise the game improves with greater numbers, but I don't think it will improve that much, as it is the kind of game the group dismiss. I knew this would be the case, and without leading anybody down that path, the others involved agreed with me. It wasn't a bad game; however there was just nothing exciting going on.

Allow me to take you through it a little. Everybody represents a Viking lord settling Greenland, in peaceful competition with his fellow Jarls. Players build settlements in the form of villages and buildings, move their influential heroes around the board and take resources for further building. Resources are split between players by "agreement", with the decision to split going to the vote, after the way the resources split has been proposed by a single player. The current player doesn't get to do this, but does have the privilege of building when all proposals have been agreed or dismissed. Because the votes are allocated according to the number of settlements a player has, in conjunction with any votes their heroes garner, it behooves players to form temporary alliances in order to take resources which would normally go to a stronger player's proposal. There is no trade between players, but they may cooperate in the building of public works, which can benefit all players in any particular area.

As it stands, this is a very interesting system of mechanisms which combine towards a model of cunning use of support, an alternative slant on the "pie rule" (where if the initial offer is rejected, nobody gets anything), clever influence of external factors through the use of heroes and some choice as to a building approach.

Where the game really falls down is the scoring system.

Graenaland is one of those games where players are attempting to reach a target score for the game to end, meeting a small number of victory conditions. I can get on with this kind of system only in small measure, and I'm afraid that despite the potential for something more cut-throat and clever, Graenaland falls way short of the mark. For a start, four of the victory conditions are completely related. If you aim for eight settlements, for instance, you're liable to meet the condition that requires two in each of three areas. If you're meeting this, then you're probably not too far off making the two buildings (or three if there's three players); going hand-in-hand with these, it's highly likely that you'll easily get four settlements in one area. That only leaves the fifth as less natural, which doesn't really take too much effort!

It's not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination; it just seems to lack the spark that would make it a great game. These days, for me at least, something that is just "good" or perhaps a bit clever in places is not enough; despite utilising some potentially mind-gnawing mechanisms, Graenaland just doesn't gel together as well as it ought to.

And I don't trust Vikings that aren't bloodthirsty!

Burned Offering

2011-06-08T16:45:00.000+01:00

Great Fire of London 1666 got an outing on Monday evening; I've since discovered there are missing arrows on the board, which might affect the flow of play, but I am not so sure adding these will address the issues the majority of our group have with the game - it's just too random.

In all fairness, I cannot say I dislike the game at all; but they're not wrong. Players are given the illusion of control through being dealt a hand of cards which they may play to spread the fire; however, there is little or no choice to be made.

Or maybe there is.

It may be the case that all this game needs is a few more plays, to allow those playing to ascertain exactly how the game engine can be influenced in their favour. Early indications seem to point towards clever manipulation of Trained Bands allowing greater control of the fire (and hence more points for the players who manage to exploit this game aspect).

I would like to believe that's all it will take to influence the outcome; however, as if the semi-random fire-spreading wasn't enough, there's the objective cards. If you get the Royal Exchange, unlucky; you're going to be six points behind everybody who hasn't got that objective from virtually the game's start! One could argue that the fire could possibly spread quickly East during the opening moves, but all that means is the lucky folk holding the Tower are now going to be six points under! Essentially, these objectives are adding more randomness to the game; you have no tangible control over the spread of the fire (which is, naturally, how fire should be) and also no control over the objective cards you will be dealt at the start. Thus, receiving a card for an area prone to burning is not going to be helpful.

To add fuel to the fire (if you'll pardon the pun), the victorious player did rather poorly in the firefighting part of the game; if there was ever a clear indication of a game almost completely out of control, this was it.

So what can we do about this? How can we make the experience of Great Fire more meaningful? We could utilise an open tableau of cards to draw from, whilst reducing the number of cards in hand. The effect would be a more strategic spread of fire - sure, it goes against the behaviour of fire in the real world, but then again so does the play of a card anyway! Alternatively, we could just make the cardplay totally random, with players drawing a card and playing it within the limits of fire spreading as dictated by the rules.

As for the objectives, well that's a bit of a poser. If we take a Ticket to ride-style approach, allowing players to choose from a number of objective cards dealt at the beginning of the game, everybody would leave the Royal Exchange well alone. If we turn the objectives around so that players gain the point for burning them down, it encourages spread of fire, but the more remote objectives would then be rejected in favour of the Royal Exhange. Perhaps it would be best to do away with them altogether?

I'm not ready to give up on Great Fire yet, as it's such a beautiful looking game, with some interesting play and ideas behind it; but I cannot spare too much time on a white elephant that nobody else in the group would like to play. So if anybody has a suggestion (other than "Burn it!"), I would be most grateful.

UK Games Expo 2011

2011-06-06T11:19:00.000+01:00

I'm fairly certain I will get a bit of flak for this, but I was disappointed in the UK Games Expo this year. To be fair, it had nothing to do with the quality of the organisation and running of the Expo; it had more to do with the delayed output from various designers and publishers, a reduced number of designers and publishers, and what I would consider an excess of traders over publishers.

Not that I have anything against the traders either; Gameslore, The Games Cellar and in particular Heron Games served me well. In addition, the Bring and Buy was very well organised, better located, but oversaturated with titles such that I only managed to sell a few of the two dozen or so games I brought along. The end result was I spent more than I would have liked, and bought less than I would have liked. Oh well, that's just another effect of the economic downturn, I suppose.

So what did I come away with? Well, the event organiser, Richard Denning, will be pleased to learn I got a copy of his Great Fire of London game; this was despite a slightly disappointing playtest (which, to be fair, was not a complete game - we just ran out of time), because I feel it would appeal to the players in our group who approve lighter fare. I did peruse Mr Denning's fiction, but only for a short while before moving on. That doesn't mean his works are not worth considering, as I think they are, but one's wallet bulges less these days and games are my preference.

I also bagged a copy of a new game by a new, up-and-coming designer; Medieval Mastery seems to hold all the elements I crave in a modern strategy. The design is elegant, the rules are easy enough to absorb, the game is configurable to the number of players and it won't take forever to play. It seems to be a fine example of a hybrid design. I am looking forward to trying this out; kudos to the team that produced it - Chaos Publishing Ltd - and I will be sure to let everybody know how well it goes when I get to play it.

I had a short list of items that were must-haves; mainly this was because I desired a few expansions for games I already had (so the two Cosmic Encounter exapnsions found their way into my bag, as did Fury of the Bear for Tide of Iron). However, I had also had recommendations for Power Struggle on account of its harsh nature and competitive play; it being one of Eggert's productions, I was naturally even more enthusiastic. I also desired something to replace Kingmaker in my collection - something multiplayer based on the same conflict. I enjoyed Peter Hawes previous offering, Heads of State, despite the artwork issues, so I added War of the Roses to the haul. On other recommendations which met my preferred style of play and design, I got a copy of Vinhos, the game about wine trading which has had generally positive response from those who like a bit of depth to their economic games.

I was also fortunate enough to play Surprised Stare's Totemo; it's an appealing little abstract that was bought by two other members of the group (so I refrained). Players stack pieces of a totem pole within a set of simple rules for best score. Should one's score marker move onto a space containing a bonus marker, you get to place another piece (up to your limit of three placements); when no more placements can be made (or when the Chief reaches his teepee) the game ends and the highest score wins. It's cute, it's quick and I highly recommend it as a filler or family game; it's also quite pretty to look at, with the core parts of the game being completely wooden and the play area/scoreboard being a printed cloth.

Other highlights included two of our group engaging each other in a game of Khet - with vocal complaints from Hatti about a requirement for spatial awareness skills, just prior to her utter defeat by Chris; bacon and sausage baps in the morning; meeting a few people I missed by not attending the usual conventions this year; and a rather shapely Catwoman wandering around the halls (MEOW!).

I do have one other slight criticism of the event; it would seem it is getting too big for the current venue. I wonder if it might be an idea to go for something a bit bigger next year?

Pulp Gaming

2011-05-18T19:15:00.000+01:00

I find it very difficult to describe the feeling of obtaining a new game to those who have never experienced it themselves. The anticipation of what is to come as you peruse the description and images on the box base; the tantalising resistance of the outer wrapping which refuses to tear; the hurried excitement as you punch and bag the components; the pains taken to digest the rules with uncertainty whilst setting the time for that first play; and most of all experiencing the foibles and nuances of this latest design. You savour the challenge, feel the competition and pick

your way through each turn like somebody trying each of the different delicacies in a newly-opened box of chocolates.

"We have a Special Relationship"

Too frequently these days, however, I'm finding that what I have purchased is not so much an exciting and new experience, but the same old flavours. Basic economic engines, worker placement, competing against the game system and not other players. They all have their place, and as with all mechanisms, are only as good as the use to which they are put.

It's all very well saying that there are subtle differences between games that make them different; but I suspect in many cases they are not different enough. What makes this worse for me, is we're not just talking about games I dislike; for instance, I tend to steer clear of anything even approaching the CCG concept (which is one of the main reasons why Dominion doesn't hold any appeal for me).

So are we approaching a period of pulp gaming - where much the same sort of game is appearing, where the whole structure just smacks of something you've already seen, and perhaps even the theme is rather stale?

"From 1999, your Father hid this King up his..."

It's quite possible that this has happened already a number of times in the past. Boardgames have, since their inception, been alternative minor sources of revenue for the printing industry; it's only in recent years that they have become something of a niche market, appealing to a cross-section of the gaming intelligentsia. Take for example the "golden age" of the 1960's; a flurry of television influences resulted in the production of boardgames themed around the more popular shows. Many of these games were exactly the same, with the only changes being character references and branding (and they say Euros have "pasted on" themes!).

"Anybody want a Black-Eye?"

Arguably, later on, during the wargaming boom of the 1970's and 1980's, the same issues were seen in the limited design capability of some hex-and-counter pulp. Frequently untested combat systems were thrown onto a hexagonal map and sold at hobby stores. In fairness, the pulp titles were a minority.

When RPGs really took off in the early 1980's, you couldn't move for new and different titles - new and different titles that followed almost exactly the same formula as the "big three" - Runequest, Traveller and the then-ubiquitous D&D/AD&D. When I look back on how my friends and myself went crazy for something new, just because it had a slightly different approach, I feel rather foolish. In many respects the differences were not great enough. Later systems got past this, but of course role-playing had passed its peak by then.

"We got the original version, before the guns

turned orange!"

It would seem that just like any other market, hobby-based or otherwise, boardgames are just another bandwagon ready for the next entrepreneur to jump on. Modern games of strategy use rather basic designs, but some seem to think this means that any old model will do. We're lucky enough to be able to enjoy the fruits of the labours of designers who put a little more thought and effort into games, beyond the gaudy and juvenile; but this doesn't mean that once a particular kind of design surfaces from the depths of the bland that every company needs to produce something similar.

It's my greatest fear these days that I am going to buy something I already have; perhaps in a different guise. We're talking more a sheep in wolf's clothing here - a game that works almost exactly the same as that on which it is based, but without the teeth. For me it's almost as bad when a game is reissued, reimagined or rethemed; as an owner or player of the original version, you're left in a situation where you have to wonder is there any added value to the new version. Even though it's not exactly pulp gaming, it's getting very close; I trust the best designers to remain innovative and interesting, but I know economics will win the fight and we will be subject to any business model that garners sales.

Let's hope I'm wrong; let's hope the next Puerto Rico is around the corner...

...without it being Puerto Rico, of course!

"Does Martin Wallace look like a bitch?"

Are you experienced?

2011-03-15T09:26:00.001Z

What is it that turns so many people off certain types of game?

I had a copy of Origins: How We Became Human for some time. I saw it at Essen nearly three years ago, thought the idea was fantastic and thought the game looked great. It took almost that amount of time to get the game played. I was very excited at the concept, and even after going through the rules I thought there was a great game in there. But our game got cut short; nobody was enjoying themselves playing it.

Before I continue, this isn't a review; I don't think I would be justified in reviewing this game, because as an experience I think it had more to offer. But that's the important part – experience.

I've occasionally heard games being referred to as “experience games”; these are games where playing is less to do with competition and more to do with being part of some story, some chain of events or some game as an experiment or lesson. Anybody who has engaged in role-playing games (RPG's) will know exactly what I am talking about; there is usually no real objective, except progression. The attraction is entirely in the experience of play; with the exception of the person running the game, nobody has any real control over what will happen, and even though their decisions will affect the outcome of any situation, a set of rules are in place to represent events outside of players' influences.

Well that's fine in an RPG setting, or even in a boardgame where it might be expected (such as Heroquest, for example). However, Origins is not – on the face of it - this type of game; so is it too much to expect a well-constructed game behind the theme of human evolution and advancement? Obviously in this case it is; I expected what I saw and what I read to result in something a little less, shall we say, uncontrollable. The theme was very interesting, and the game presented it well; but for the players it was just a touch too random and it felt like we had invested a lot of time to get wherever the game wanted us to be.

This experience factor is part of the reason I dread trying to get Arkham Horror on the table; I don't think the group will appreciate spending hours following the game processes with minimal decision-making. I mean, being a bit of a Cthulhu fan of old, I will be well into it; but I can see the other players being rather puzzled. They won't be confused by how to play, they'll be confused about where the “real” game actually is. And that's the problem with experience games; if you're not into the experience, you might as well be playing Snakes & Ladders.

Medieval Intrigue and Missed Opportunities.

2010-12-22T09:45:00.007Z

Sometimes it is very difficult to get a particular title played; this could be for various reasons. Some players dislike the theme of the game (wargames or war-themed games are often a difficulty with one group I attend), others are turned off by some particular mechanical aspect (such as a heavily-random element). In the case of Krakow 1325 AD, neither of these kept it from the table; for Krakow, it was the combination of the required number of players and my willingness to bring it out.

Around one month ago, over two years after I purchased the game at Essen, Krakow 1325 AD finally saw its first play at our group. I am now at a loss as to why it took me so long.

Krakow is a relatively unusual concept in modern strategy boardgames, in a number of ways. The design is for exactly four players (yes, a three-player expansion is available, but the game is clearly best suited to four); it's also a partnership game, in that players seated opposite are partners for the entire game. You don't think that's unusual? Well, how about the fact that the partners are not really partners at all, and have their own hidden interest?

Well, alright; if you take those characteristics in isolation, you've seen them all before; but when they're combined with each other, and to the core mechanism of area influence, you have something unique. I could be wrong, but I don't think I have ever played anything like Krakow 1325 AD.

The game board represents the city of Krakow, divided in a number of districts with areas of influence. Each turn, one player leads a trick by playing a single card which will allow him to place influence for his team (him and his partner) in a particular district. In turn, the other players then oppose or support this card, by playing one from their hand. If the lead player and his partner win the trick, then the influence is placed and the lead card goes into a pile, which will score for the social caste it represents. If not, then it has been successfully opposed and a new trick is led by the winner of the last trick. This continues until all tricks for the season have been played, when new cards are dealt and the process begins again. After four seasons, the year is over and scoring takes place. Social castes are also scored, according to the cards that won tricks.

The game can be played for one, two or three game years, depending on how long you wish to play for. When the game finishes, players combine their “secret” score with their known score; the highest score wins, referring to tiebreakers as necessary.

You can probably see why I never really pushed this game to get it played; it all sounds very run-of-the-mill and humdrum. However, Krakow is an excellent experience; we played with the intent of finishing after one game year, but the group were so taken with it we continued to play the long, three-year game. By this time, most players had a good idea of who represented which social caste; but that uncertainty adds to the experience.

Ultimately, the game is a card game; hand management is everything, and like Bridge, you rely heavily on your partner for success. At the same time, you are trying to underhandedly undermine your partner's social caste, without helping the opposing factions too much. It's these wheels within wheels which add great interest to what would otherwise be just another trick-taking card game.

If your group is usually four, or you can easily table four at your group, this game is an excellent choice; however, this characteristic is possibly the main reason it took so long for me to get it played. It has, historically, been a rare occurrence for our group to consist of exactly four at the table; even rarer than that was for my bringing the game along to coincide with a table of exactly four. When the opportunity to play it finally came, it was worth it.

I remember talking to the designer, Peter Strujf, at Essen a couple of years ago. I was very nearly put off by the number of players required; it could probably be played with two players as it is, but I doubt it would be as good (and two is still not a good number for a multiplayer group). I bought a copy anyway, and I was glad I did.

Let's face it, every game ever designed has a sweet spot for the number of players, and very few actually scale well. I have so many games in my collection that I will not play with a particular number of players after bad experiences, I tend to think they have only scaled them in the first place with a mind to sell more copies. Nothing wrong with that, but I would rather be able to hit that sweet spot first time; which is why I appreciate what Peter has done with his design. True, he has issued an expansion to take it to three players, but I just cannot see it being as good as playing with four.

So if your table is typically four, you have a penchant for card games and area influence, and you like something with a bit more theme than usual, you really ought to seek out a copy of Krakow 1325 AD.

First-Aid Mechanisms

2010-07-30T16:04:00.003+01:00

You’ve just completed your game design, having revised it three times after extensive playtesting; yet something doesn’t feel quite right. There seems to be a slight imbalance which only manifests itself after several plays; the development of a runaway leader in particular situations, or a sure-win strategy, for example. There is no way you’re going to redesign the core system; up until now it’s worked so well; there’s only one thing for it, you’ll have to add in an arbitrary mechanism which will snuff out the problem.

I often get the feeling there is a mechanism teetering on the edge of a design which just feels like it shouldn’t be there; yet without it the game just wouldn’t work so well. They often seem like a afterthought, something the designer used to patch up a hole or two in the game system. The effect is usually as desired, but when too many of them occur there is a risk of a game design becoming somewhat fiddly and inelegant. In fact, the presence of a single one of these sticking-plaster mechanisms detracts from any elegance there was.

I’m not talking about flavour mechanisms here; the inclusion of these often throws the balance sideways, but they are not superfluous to the core system. No, I’m talking about a game design that sprung a leak that had to be stopped. I’m not necessarily saying they’re a bad thing; but sometimes it’s downright lazy when the design issue could have been dealt with in a cleaner manner, leaving the appearance and flow of the game relatively unscarred.

To cite an example, I wanted to get Imperial back to the table after a gap of over two years. I read the rulebook again, revisited posts on BGG just to make sure I was aware of any issues and ensured I had the relevant player aids for others (being the only player who had ever played). And there it was, the Investor Card, sat hideously on the smooth surface of game flow. For those of you unfamiliar with the game, on an Investor action, this card gives one player a bit more money and the opportunity to invest in one of the nations before passing it round to the left. This has clearly been designed to improve cash flow within the game, encourage buying bonds and hence move the game closer to a conclusion. This is a very artificial way to encourage this; to their credit, publishers Eggert Spiele also presented an alternative ruling with no investor card (which is now the preferred method for many groups); the game flow feels less artificial without it.

One of my favourite games is Age of Steam (AoS); sadly, the same view is not shared by many in our games group, not necessarily for the reason about to follow. I can only speculate that the designer, Martin Wallace, was experiencing runaway leader issues with AoS at the early stages of design, which led to the introduction of the Income Reduction rule. This rule reined in the front runners a touch, moving them back on the income track – the further along they were, the more they would move back. The problem some detractors had with this wasn’t so much with the purpose of the mechanism or how well it performed its task; the real issue was with the side-effect, that one player could nudge another into the next “zone” and force a reduction in his income. Arguably, this added a certain tension to the game (one I have to admit to enjoying) and was just another nail sticking out of the smooth plasterwork I could hang something from. However, I cannot deny its inelegance; that “tacked-on” feeling I got when I considered it just as I was about to push somebody over the line.

Notice I talk in the past tense here, because with the much-debated “3^rd edition”, later to become Steam, Martin completely removed most of the inelegance. This facelift also did away with the auction (left as an optional variant to what was known as the “Base Game”), an element I rather liked in AoS but which drove others away due to its alleged clunkiness.

Both the Imperial and AoS examples show us that there is always a way of correcting design issues very neatly; some of the following examples of first-aid mechanisms show that maxim is not always followed:

Small World is an updated version of Vinci, in a fantasy setting. There are a few problems with this version, albeit problems that leave it still very playable. One of these problems is the limited-turns game length, brought about by a combination of Vinci being a slightly longer than usual Eurogame and the newly-adopted hidden VPs (which, given the view of the endgame in the original, I can somewhat accept). The direct effect of this has been to leave a game which doesn’t have much room to develop; this pushes me back towards Vinci every time. Seriously, I cannot see why it needed to be shorter if the game evolution was to be affected; and this isn’t the only game to suffer this fate.

Warrior Knights, a Games Workshop stalwart from the 80’s, was brought up-to-date for the Euro-age a few years ago by FFG. Combat was altered, political, economic and religious influences changed and the whole game flow was tidied up into something more palatable to those opposed to old-school turn sequences. The one snag FFG could not easily overcome was the playing time. This was artificially curtailed with the concept of Prestige, earned on a turn-by-turn basis with a winner being declared when the pool ran out. It didn’t work; FFG had failed to notice that time would run out just as the game was warming up. The simple solution was, of course, to throw into the pool some extra prestige. This worked a bit better, but it wasn’t until the expansion arrived that the game really hit the mark – unfortunately it also hit the six-hours-plus mark, and there’s no coming back.

Twilight Imperium (3^rd edition) borrowed one of the best mechanisms from Puerto Rico. The action selection brought a beneficial action for one player and another, lesser action for everyone else. Again, FFG were faced with the problem of fitting a square peg in a round hole – getting an epic game to fit into Euro-time. The idea for the Imperial action arises; give a player a couple of points and everybody else can build more stuff. The game will inevitably be dragged towards a prompt conclusion. The consumers hated it, prompting a gazillion variants and a new version of the card in the expansion (when it arrived). Too late to tear away the duct tape, I’m afraid.

Of course, patching up a game with spurious mechanisms doesn’t necessarily ruin it; all of the above games form part of my favourites. And from the above it might seem I have something against the “Americanised” versions of Euro-games; I can assure you it isn’t so. But should we, as gamers, really be taking our hammers and nails, administering repairs to a system which could have been built properly from the ground up? I think not.

UK Games Expo 2010

2010-06-08T10:05:00.003+01:00

Last weekend, the UK Games Expo took place in Birmingham. Just like we have done for the past two years, we visited on the Sunday, driving up in the morning. You see, despite claims this is expanding, it is still an event which we can get around in one day (so that's what we do); although, to be fair, we don't get involved in any of the tournaments or activities (other than trying out a few new titles). Oddly, for the first time, we were queueing up outside to get in. Historically access was very much smoother, with prebooked ticket-holders sailing through the entrance, and gate payers moving slightly slower. This year it seemed to go the other way around.

After a quick visit to the bring and buy stand, it was time to go and see what interesting titles had been designed this year; I have to say I was fairly disappointed - not so much in what was available but rather in what wasn't. Once again, I spent a lot of time hearing about games that are not coming out just yet. Great Fire: London 1666 has apparently been delayed due to contracted manufacturer issues with the wooden bits (so now I have to wait for Essen). Surprised Stare's rail-building game (name unknown; it's not a rail-network game and looks very interesting) is still under development. What could be found were two different games from two different companies reflecting the same historical era. The Ragnar Brothers' Workshop of the World is a rather abstract representation of the building of canal and rail networks during the Industrial Revolution. Players build factories in cities and earn money by connecting them through their networks to other cities. This is done in one half of the game using canals, and in the other half of the game using railways. Granted, it is a very familiar theme; but the adopted mechanisms make it rather unique within this wide genre. Workshop has been trimmed down to a blind bid auction or an initial factory build, followed by simple network building. It's quick, it's neat and works very well.

The other game was Age of Industry; Martin Wallace's reimplementation (or simplification if you prefer) of Brass. Gone are the locale-specific characteristics, gone are the income and VP tracks, gone are the canals and gone is the North West of England. Instead, it's railways only (because no other industrial nation went so heavy on canal building as Great Britain), with factories added (in addition to the mills), using two different maps (Germany and New England). The game has been made expandable by using more generic components; paraphrasing the designer, it's easier to create a new player sheet than a new set of player counters. Having played Brass quite a few times, I can say this is rather diluted in comparison; but this is not necessarily a bad thing when you have trouble persuading your games group to sink their teeth into one of Wallace's notoriously heavy titles. In the way of boardgames, there was not much else.

I noticed a marked increase in the number of miniatures wargames and role-playing games stands; but in all fairness it was probably just how I perceived it, considering the reduced presence of board/boxed game designers selling their ideas. I have been informed this event has got bigger with respect to boardgames; I am sorry, I just didn't see it. One fellow conspicuous in his absence was Jackson Pope of Reiver Games which, sadly, had to cease trading quite recently; that was something we were very sad to hear (announced on BGG recently).

Of course, the usual traders were present for the most part; and naturally I made a few purchases. But with passing mention to the omnipresent Doctor Who impersonators there was not much else there; indeed, with the notable exception of one or two of his assistants, they were quite annoying for me. I know, the kids like it, the odd aficionado might too; but for something set up (as far as I was aware) for boardgamers, that's a little too much Sci-Fi convention cross-over. And on that rather curmudgeonly note, it's time for me to finish. I look forward to next year, when I hope there is an increase in boardgame interest over and above what I experienced this year.

Pawnstar’s Perambulatory Progress on his Potentially Perfect Paramount Plan for Pro-Ludic Pastime Paradise.

2010-04-30T09:43:00.003+01:00

Stage one is now underway. I put together a list of games from my BGG collection. I selected definite keepers first, definite losers next and then tried to sift through the 800 or so games inbetween.

What essentially I have ended up with, is around 350 games which will certainly remain (for the time being at least) in my collection. Ideally, I would have liked to reduce this to around 200 titles (with some duplicates of the same title, which cannot be helped); but realistically it is difficult for me to let go of some games I still long to play despite the lack of any real hope of doing so (at least for the near future).

Of the rest, I managed to put around 300 on a cull list; this was very hard to do in some cases, especially for unused titles I intended to play when I purchased them but have, as yet, gone unused. Many more mainstream and older titles (around 100) have now been bagged for delivery to charity shops; but I have also given the list to a number of work colleagues and gaming friends.

That leaves around 300 titles I am still unsure about whether to keep or cull. Practically, I should put them straight on the cull list; actually, in most cases, I would like at least to play some of them (again or for the first time) before I decide.

Do I feel better for all this? Well in a way, yes; but it's a mixture of relief and sadness, like losing a sick pet. Oh well, never mind; I'm sure some gaming will sort me out.

Pawnstar’s Perfect Paramount Plan for Pro-Ludic Pastime Paradise.

2010-04-06T09:30:00.001+01:00

Storage is the collector’s best friend, and his worst enemy. Alright, I am more gamer than collector these days, but taking a step back it’s obvious that despite my best efforts so far I still have more than a thousand games. The lack of storage space chokes out any possibility of expansion; but once I am rid of the truly rubbish items, I really need to ensure the collection stays manageable. The danger is, the gaps may be filled fairly quickly by games I actually want to keep and play, leaving a collection I cannot reduce as easily as before.

The obvious solution is to pay for storage at one of these big storage facilities. My first thought was that good games I play rarely but want to keep should go into storage; this would work out at around the same price per year as I used to spend on games, so could be manageable, but I would rather spend less.

A less appealing solution then popped into my head. I could sell off everything that is not too rare (as well as whatever is unwanted), reduce dramatically the collection side and find an easy storage solution – the one I have already. I could then buy a game, as and when I want to play it, selling it on to avoid taking up storage for a few years before it resurfaces.

The latter option seemed very drastic at first, and would definitely go against the grain; however, if you think about it, it probably makes more sense. To store what I have is too much; to store it elsewhere (other than my own property) is going to cost. The costs incurred will be equivalent to buying at least one boardgame a month, yet only a small percentage of the games will see any use on a month-by-month basis.

Looking at it from a different angle, the angle of time; if I were to play every game just once at a rate of one game per day, it would take me three years to go through every one I own. This is not going to happen, I just do not have the time; apart from that, I would be hard pressed to persuade enough people to sit down with some of them.

Economically, especially if storage is an issue, it would be better if I sold or traded away any game that is not used for a while (a “while” being indeterminate, but certainly “irregularly” or “not at all”) because it would potentially cost less to buy another than to store a copy indefinitely. I mean, as long as I can go out and buy another copy, or I can play somebody else’s copy, not owning a particular game should not be an issue. This would further encourage me that investing in new games deserves more consideration (as opposed to my old maxim of “I like the look of that one; I’ll buy a copy”).

So the plan I must follow is almost clear; from those games I have played, I must:

1. Select a core set of games to keep, which meet most (at least four) of the following criteria:

a. I like the game a lot (9-10 rating)

b. Often played

c. Not too similar to each other

d. Owned by nobody else in the group

e. Are likely to be played regularly

f. Are likely to maintain these properties for an indeterminate period

2. Select an outer set of games to keep which meet most (at least four) of the following criteria:

a. I like the game (7-10 rating)

b. Of interest to more than one in the group

c. Not too similar to anything selected under 1

d. Owned by nobody else in the group

e. Are likely to be played at all

f. Classified “rare”

3. Sell any games which meet all of the following criteria:

a. Are complete

b. Are of interest to other gamers

c. Can garner a reasonable price

d. Fit criteria from 1 or 2, but are deemed:

i. Surplus to requirements

ii. Not as retainable as all others which fit those criteria

Anything else will be donated, given away, dismantled or destroyed; depending on condition of course, and excluding games I have not yet played (and have every intention of playing). It’s the perfect plan to make my collection more manageable; how easy this will be to implement remains to be seen (I feel quite emotional just thinking about it), but I will be trying to do this very soon!

Another Kick in the Nuts from Games Workshop.

2009-11-26T16:01:00.002Z

It's been a long time since I posted anything here; I wish it could have been something better.

Back when I was a lowly role-player, around about the same time the main games shop in Liverpool keeled over, Games Workshop decided their product range needed changing. it was out with their general retail model (selling games and related products from many companies) and in with the restrictive GW only approach they have maintained around twenty years on. That was painful, but for some reason a decade later I allowed myself to fall in line with their new product range; despite the fact they had stopped doing anything with real variety and had concentrated on the Warhammer universe.

After a couple more years, I discovered all they were ever interested in was clawing more and more money out of their customers. Minis, rules and entire product ranges would be reworked and reissued; this left most of the older stuff obsolete. You may consider this to be a sound business model, but it lost mine and I walked away. But I could still enjoy their golden oldie boardgames, and continued to do so. When I eventually came across a young BoardGameGeek database, I was pleased to find these games were supported there too, despite GW's ignorance.

But now, they've kicked me while I'm down again. This time it's personal. In a blind attempt to protect the IP for games they no longer support (at least for one quarter of a century), they have issued a C&D order to BGG who have been forced to make sweeping deletions of any files in danger of violating their all-of-a-sudden reclaimed IP. This means a lot of work by fans of their games (old and new) has gone forever.

That's three strikes, Games Workshop - you are out!

Aren't We All Minimaxing?

2009-07-01T12:21:00.000+01:00

I played Steam last night, and when it came to deciding whether to outbid the high bidder for first in the initial turn order I had to consider how important the locomotive action was to me. I reasoned with myself that I would need to be first in the turn order to get locomotive; however to take first I would have had to bid $4. The cost to upgrade the locomotive would have been another $6 (to level 2), meaning I was capitalising twice to get that extra link’s shipment. This would have been break-even on the action, with the added benefit of first in turn order for this turn. However, the available goods at the start only allowed for a single two-link shipment wherever I built; this meant that there was more benefit at that point in not paying for a locomotive upgrade at all ad using an action to upgrade instead.

I then realised I had been minimaxing heavily to arrive at that conclusion. Now, me personally, I’ve never seen minimaxing as a pariah, but I hear tell that some do. Minimaxing is the act of working out the best possible action to choose with the intention of maximising benefit and minimising cost. Minimaxing is conducive to analysis paralysis (AP), a much-feared condition of the strategy game; but surely AP is a necessary evil, especially if we’re all going to insist on playing games requiring any level of planning? And regardless of what the game system encourages, aren’t we all just minimaxing anyway?

This is probably less obvious when the game is not directly employing an economic engine of sorts. A trick taking card game; Wizard for instance. The resource is your hand of cards and you have to best play those cards to maximise the tricks you win (or in this case get as close as possible to your target). Or how about a wargame? The cost is your forces, the benefit is some objective (be it territorial or something else).

I mean, surely this is exactly what strategy games are all about. You’re given a situation, a problem or set of problems if you will; you then set about dealing with that situation in order to put yourself in a potentially winning position. So perhaps we’re all just minimaxing, even if we don’t always know it?

Failure is an Option?

2009-06-11T13:39:00.006+01:00

I'm sure many gamers out there are familiar with the word "broken". In general when we're talking about games it should only ever apply to games which do not work because it is too easy for one player to exploit a flaw in the game's system and produce the most undesirable effects which render the game unplayable.

However, a lot of games carry similar features which actually don't break the game at all. Take for instance Royal Palace; if a player should happen to move all of his servants off the stairs, there is no way he will be able to move any of his servants for the rest of the game. I've been thinking about this for a while; there have been lots of games where suicide moves can be easily arranged which will throw the player making them into a guaranteed losing position.

You may have noticed a sort of counter-culture emerging in society that goes against the grain of the ever-prevalent blame-culture. This is the train of thought that if some system, method or legislation allows for almost obvious mistakes to be made, then somebody goes ahead and makes them, it is the fault of the system, method or legislation. It's conveniently forgiving sometimes, mainly it's acceptable because the reasoning would follow that if a system allows something to happen the system is flawed.

So my question is this: should game rules or systems exclude the possibility of suicide moves by ruling against their occurrence, or should the problem with such decisions be completely left to the players?

Things Which Are Starting to Really Annoy Me in Boardgames

2009-05-02T06:48:00.000+01:00

Arbitrarily Unpredictable Elements

I'm not talking about dice here; you see dice and you know what to expect. I'm not necessarily talking about the draw of a card, though in some games the element is represented as such. I am talking about in-game situations, in a game which can generally be cosidered a controlled game, which allow one player to blow the opposition out of the water simply because they met the right conditions at the right time without any real prior planning. A case in point is the Coal Trader card in Le Havre, the problems with which have come to light almost half a year after the game went into general circulation.

Redundant Components

There seem to be more and more of these lately; they seem to be the result of game publishers or manufacturers simply wanting to bulk-out the box contents. Why do I need the board in Le Havre? Why the scoring track in games where progressive in-game scoring is not used? Why the extra part or parts which indicate your intentions for an action you are about to carry out anyway? In some cases (Cavum comes to mind - I ought to review that one) it's the box itself, though I tend to be more lenient on that as long as they don't decide to bump up the price for something which could have been boxed for less.

Wrong Components

Why is it that some games seem to use the most impractical parts? Take the scoring device in Capitol; a complete design flaw which would have worked much better had it been a track around the outside edge. That was a long time ago in terms of the hobby; yet there are still mistakes like this made constantly. Oversized empty city markers in Railroad Tycoon, flimsy tiles in Galactic Emperor (though I acknowledge an upgrade is now available - got one, thanks), the locomotive pieces for track ownership in the new Age of Steam reprint, i'm sure you get the picture.

Post-Release Development

I don't have a problem with, say, the concept of living rules. I do have a problem with having to change the components I use in a game I bought in its first (or at least early) edition because somebody found out there was a problem later on. It's really, really irritating; furthermore arguments such as "wait for the second edition" or "don't buy games you haven't played, then" really don't cut it. There's a subtle but important difference between improving a game and releasing an underdeveloped game. Which brings me to...

Unnecessary Necessary Expansions

I like expansions, but I'm getting ever more aggravated by the constant flow of incomplete boardgames just so the publishers can give you the rest of it in expansion form. Absolute rubbish is often made good by an expansion, which makes me wonder why they didn't release it that way in the first instance. The real answer is because they want to milk the consumer of more money. This is acceptable from the business viewpoint, but it's only going to work with me short term. If I buy one more game which needs expanding before I can play it properly the publisher concerned is going to be sorry (well, perhaps not - there are bound to be other mugs like me to take up where I left off).

Retheming

A slightly milder rant here; I'm actually not that upset by retheming most of the time, especially if it means a rare game being reprinted. What I do have a problem with is the recycling of old games with different themes just so the publisher involved can make more on it at the gamer's expense. Like I said regarding expansions, I have no quarrel with somebody who is running a business making such decisions normally. However there's always the instance where you buy a game thinkig you are getting something different only to find it's nothing more than game X rethemed to make game Y. It brings even more confusion if the new theme and title chosen make the game look almost exactly like the game of the same name you were after for years (as in Razzia, and the remake of Ra, Razzia). Alright, like I said it's only a mild rant, but it's a problem all the same.

Reworking

It's not the reworking that's the problem so much as how so many games end up in umpteen different versions. I mean, what if there is a rules dispute and one of the players (who thought he knew the rules since 1995) finds his whole game strategy was screwed by the changes in the rules which weren't immediately so apparent?

Required Strategies

Leaving aside the broken games in which there is always a killer strategy (because I'm not likely to play them more than once), games in which there is a dominant strategy are really starting to get me riled. The requirement to follow a particular series of actions to stand a chance to achieve victory often boils a game down to a single key point in the game. In some instances, this is not an issue because of the fun ride to get there or the short game length. However, I find it more and more irritating that everything else is just a tie-breaker. The more concrete examples could almost appear to be broken, but they are not; it's simply a matter of coming first in something only mildly influential on the entire game. Recent offending examples would include Senji and Princes of Machu Picchu (though I'm not entirely sure of the latter example yet).

This Game Could Senji Mad!

2009-03-04T14:47:00.000Z

There are a lot of games about feudal Japan out there and the latest in this long boardgaming tradition is Senji from Asmodee. I first took an interest in Senji during the omnipresent hype, generated for a myriad boardgames, by various voices of the gaming world prior to Spiel at Essen, last October. The game looked like a fairly interesting game of military strategy and political intrigue (a term not originally mine; I think it comes off the side of Waddington’s Campaign which is another game lacking the “intrigue” on the side of the box); both my interest and that of a friend were piqued because it looked like somebody had taken the old-fashioned strategic wargame and swept away the requirement to win solely by military means. So the plan was, when I wnent over, I would buy a copy as part of my friend’s shopping list. The problem at the time was that the only copies available at Essen were German-language copies; having been informed much of the in-game information would be affected by this, I passed on it.

Earlier this year, I came across the English-language edition and bought a copy. Again, the base-box blurb convinced me it would be the kind of game I would like (and if I’m putting it like that, reading this you just know what follows is not going to be pleasing). I bought a copy, took it home, read the rules and, after around six weeks, finally got to play it last night.

So that’s the background, now onto the game itself. The components are not too bad but not really impressive either. Drool-worthy miniatures of castles and samurai are accompanied by punch-out cardboard disks to represent players’ military units. There is also a colourful playing board and good quality hanafuda card decks (a Japanese card game; the cards are used as commodities for trading and gaining honour points), player diplomacy cards (used for making deals with other players) and samurai (which enhance your forces and give an added benefit using their special ability). Altogether the presentation is quite nice; my one complaint in this regard was a lack of province names which made indicating a province difficult without having to point directly at it (something you don’t want to do if you are trying to be secretive).

The game is, basically, about gathering “honour points” in order to be appointed Shogun by the Emperor. In the first phase of the turn, the player with the most honour welcomes the Emperor into his home (which is a posh way of saying they get the added benefit of deciding in which order play will occur). In the second phase, players enter into diplomacy with other players; a four-minute period is started and enforced by the player welcoming the Emperor. Next orders are placed in the provinces, each province being able to trade, move or recruit. Then the player welcoming the Emperor decides the order in which orders are resolved. Finally there is a round of trading and purchasing in which players may, for example, use trade cards from others, build melds from hanafuda cards for points or samurai, or return cards to other players for points. If nobody has met or exceeded the sixty-point target, then a new turn will being; otherwise the player who scores highest wins the game and the title of Shogun.

It all sounds very much like an interesting game; the problem is that it isn’t. Take, for instance, the map in the middle. One would think there would be strategic value in certain areas; there isn’t as such apart from the minimal positional effect between players. In fact, the use of a board at all seems rather tangential to the actual scoring of points. The vast majority of points can be scored from continually trading and producing; the whole prospect of attacking another player seems slightly pointless in comparison. There is just too great an imbalance there; what we really have is a Rummy-style game with combat thrown into the middle.

Combat itself is interestingly unpredictable. Enough dice are rolled that any military advantage could be instantly rendered arbitrary to the result. Furthermore, the rewards are only great if you either attack early enough in the game that you will get more from the territory taken, or attack with a strong enough force against a strong enough force that would infer a great gain in honour. Either way, should you lose it is your opponent’s gain. The greatest points gain would be as a result of an even battle at the maximum allowed strength; a successful attack brings 26 points for the attacker. But if the roll just doesn’t go your way then your target is getting 13. Furthermore, both sides will lose everything (except the victor’s samurai); and building up that army again will take more time than it would to, say, build up a set of cards scoring at least eight points and possibly more.

Clearly, combat is on the periphery in this game; so what it comes down to is clever diplomacy and getting the right cards to score higher sets. However the only way diplomacy can be clever is if you exchange the right cards at the right time. It’s a shame, because the whole diplomacy idea is quite interesting, despite it sitting in the middle of a sea of arbitrariness. For the way diplomacy works, I just feel four players isn’t enough. I concur with the premise that this may change with more players, but I can’t ever see it working as well as it seems to have been intended.

Then there is the trade itself, and cashing in those hanafuda cards; realistically this is the only part of the game that works as it should. But in conjunction with the other key strategies this just doesn’t fit. Collect cards, create melds and score points. I hate to say it, but I might as well play Ticket to Ride. Nothing else is as important as this action; taking territory from a player removes some capability for production, however the benefits to the individual for invasive action is (as I have discussed) limited.

To improve this game, I would like to see the following:

1. Make the gameboard more useful – attach direct value to the territories, or dispense with the whole strategic layout; put names in provinces so we know where we are.

2. Make the combat less nonsensical – I don’t necessarily want a “sure thing” but having to sacrifice an entire army because the roll didn’t go your way seems a touch ridiculous.

3. Allow less points for melds – extends the game a bit, but also allows the game to develop rather than revert to Rummy status.

In summary, I don’t like this game. I abhor the fact I parted with good money for it, but even worse I detest the fact that the game doesn’t behave the way it looks like it should. For a moment you think that clever diplomacy and trade present alternative strategies to the usual militaristic game style; in reality they render the militaristic element irrelevant – almost to the point that the whole board is chrome. My advice to the uninformed is as follows; if you’re after a grand strategy game based in feudal Japan pick Samurai Swords or Samurai & Katana, if you want a Rummy variant with bells on, pick Ticket to Ride or any of the myriad card games that perform a similar function.

What's in a Name?

2009-02-17T13:56:00.001Z

Much fuss was made when Ameritrashers demanded an identity on Board Game Geek; there was quite a furore, a few sharp-tongued show-offs got banned and others less vocal left in disgust. It was because some of us (and I include me in that group) were not prepared to accept their genre actually existed. Their concern about identifying the games they prefer from a single term probably came from the hobby itself; wargamers were quick to dismiss the games they liked as non-wargames, strategy gamers said they were too random, Eurogamers said they were just too - well - trashy. As much as I dislike the term "Ameritrash", it seems it was all this group of gamers could find to identify themselves.

Recently some have questioned the term "Euro", or "Eurogame", for almost exactly the same reasons I personally questioned the validity of Ameritrash as a genre - the usefulness of the word in defining the games it is meant to encompass. The trouble is that, as Euros have become more prolific, their consistency has diversified. Where we could once look at our copy of El Grande or Settlers and say "That is a German Game" or "That is a Euro", it is proving more difficult to correlate newer titles to the moniker they have been assigned.

Way back when I started getting involved in the Internet, gamers were getting irate over other words, such as "Kingmaker" and "Elegance". In all honesty, these were rather petty squabbles (at least on my part) which could clearly have been settled if any of us involved accepted that it is possible to have more than one definition for a single word. To be quite frank, I find that very difficult. I understand a word can evolve to mean something other than it originally did; I accept words often have more than one meaning and I can see where it can be useful to use a particular word for the sake of convenience. My problem is that if we can't tightly define a word as representing something as particular as possible then it's not going to be a very useful word. I was once, as a child, told I was silly for implying that, if we were brought up to believe "blue" actually meant "green" then green would actually be blue. That precise difficulty is what is happening here; we can't leave such terms ill-defined or there will be naught but confusion.

However I also feel that as a genre there can be more than one interpretation so perhaps it is best if we simply leave the Euro to evolve into subgroups - much in the way rock-and-roll evolved into heavy metal and progressive variants around the same time. So for the sake of keeping a definition as loose as possible we must qualify the word "Euro" with something else. I don't precisely know what, but I'm sure over time I will.

A Festive Tale

2008-12-23T12:50:00.003Z

Wrapping his scarf ever tighter, Bob Crotchet made his way through the wintry streets. The dark, Christmas Eve sky was even darker against the fresh white landscape of the city rooftops and he was weary from being worked ever so hard by his employer Ebenezer Scrote. With Christmas so close, old Scrote had been more and more keen that Bob push the sales of the new Pinkermon card game; a collectable card game about a celebrated detective agency capturing strange animals to train them. Bob had always learned in the past that, despite his strong desire to persuade old Scrote to embrace the new, European designs, it was best to keep his mouth shut and carry on. As he taught all the snooty children about the patented mechanism called Tipping, where cards are angled at approximately sixty degrees to indicate they were ready to be used, Bob had thought about Tiny Tom, his youngest son, who had suffered a serious accident involving a Monopoly board and a stack of roast chestnuts a few years before. Now Bob was on his way home, to his loving wife and large family.

Yes, the Crotchets were poor, very very poor, and although Bob worked long hard hours at the ULGS (Unfriendly Local Game Store) he found he could bring little home to them. And yet Bob knew, deep down that there must be some goodness in Ebenezer somewhere; even if the only bonus he got was the odd five-sided teetotum or a spare copy of Unclear War. Still, as he picked his way along the icy backstreets towards his house (which he had to build himself from unwanted copies of Eagle Games) he could not find a nice word to say about old Ebenezer Scrote and his ULGS – Marty and Scrote – named for both him and his partner Marty Hopkirk (long since passed on – to Coronation Street). In fact, as Bob contemplated what the family would be playing after their Christmas lunch of roast wadjet, he kept his mind and his mouth tight shut. “If I can’t say nothing nice, I won’t say a thing!”

“My, what a lovely meal, my sweet,” said Bob to his wife, “I would wager you’ll find trouble topping those sparrow hearts and rat tongues tomorrow, my dear!” It had taken Bob over an hour to stomach it all, eleven of his children were also having trouble; but Tiny Tom had single-handedly (as he was single-handed) raked through the entire goose served to him without even blinking, his huge engorged gut rumbling at the prospect of another plum duff all to himself.
“And how is my special son Tom, then?” asked Bob.

“Two hundred for passing Go!” shouted Tom, continuing with “That’s fifty pounds for landing on Mayfair – oh no, you can double that because it’s undeveloped!”

“Poor thing,” said Mrs Bob Crotchet, “he’s been like that ever since the accident. Have some more cranberry sauce you poor boy.”

Tom belched and proceeded to stare with a large grin across his moon face towards his doting father. At that moment there was a rap on the door (which was a cardboard flap made from a Conquest of the Empire box lid).

“Whoever can it be?” enquired Bob and his wife together. They carefully removed a few pieces from their sprues and peered outside.

“It’s old Scrote! Whatever is he doing here?” panicked Bob’s wife.

“Best open the door and let him in, wife,” said Bob, “it may be that the economic downturn we’ve all experienced has forced him to close down the ULGS and he has had to make me redundant.”

Scrote stepped languidly into the low light of the Crotchets’ dining room (which was a copy of Eagle’s American Civil War with the board for a table). Bob immediately pulled up a copy of Sid Meier’s Civilization – The Board Game for Scrote to sit on; so old Ebenezer sat.

“I have grave news for you, Crotchet,” he said in a low, ill-tempered voice. Then suddenly, his face changed. Ebenezer’s expression went from stern to pleased so quickly Bob had to check he hadn’t given him a real chair to sit on. “Oh it’s no use; I just had to let you know I’ve ordered heaps and heaps of Eurogames! I have even brought the first batch with me!”

From under his coat, Ebenezer whipped something out. No, not what you think; it was a copy of Carcassonne. Then he produced a box marked “Settlers of Catan” and another labelled “El Grande”.

Bob could hardly believe his eyes, nor could he believe his ears when Scrote leaned over the table/ACW gameboard and said, “So, Tiny Tom; what do you want to play”. Tiny Tom’s piggy eyes glimmered from behind the folds of flesh, as a chubby finger pointed towards El Grande. “So be it,” said Ebenezer as he assembled the Castillo.

As he did so, Tiny Tom started to turn blue. It seemed like he was gasping for air, and as his eleven brothers and sisters looked on, and as Bob and his boss Ebenezer set up the game, Tiny Tom keeled over, no longer breathing. As he hit the hard wooden floor (made from all of the cubes of every copy of Age of Mythology: The Boardgame that the ULGS had thrown out), something fell from his open mouth.

“I seem to have lost the King piece from this game,” said a concerned Ebenezer. “Ah, here it is!” chuckled old Scrote loudly, as he stooped to pick up the object that Tiny Tom had deposited in his dying throes.

And as Scrote dealt the cards and Bob distributed the caballeros, together the Crotchets said, “God bless us, every one!”

A Brick Too Far?

2008-12-05T10:21:00.004Z

One of the games I brought back from Essen this year was A Castle for All Seasons. It was clear from the description I had before the fair that this would be a game of resource gathering and building – a core subject that has been used again and again in a myriad of ways. To be fair it is a theme that will never tire; there are so many possible ways of doing this. But has A Castle for All Seasons gone a brick too far?

The game comes with a two-sided game board (representing the seasons and allowing the choice to play one of two different ways), a set of resources (surprise surprise) representing sand, wood, brick and stone, a set of silver ingots, building tiles (represented like architectural plans) and cards for the players to use in their action selection (different characters allowing different actions). Of course there are also a set of cards to use with the “Winter” side of the board, which every so often throw a random spanner in the works just to make things interesting; this review does not cover how they work – I don’t think I can bear the thought of adding more chaos to a game like this.

In the four-player game (which is the only way I have played), there are twelve rounds in total; for each round a player has to choose one of eight actions, recycling his character cards only when he plays his Master Builder as an action. The implications of this are that each player should carefully consider their actions working towards maximum points at the end of the last round. Naturally, this isn’t that straightforward; some character actions depend entirely on what other players play, and there is a strict order to execution. The result can often be that the action you expected somebody else to play does not materialise – nobody builds when your Master Builder is actioned, or your Stonemason cannot buy resources because there are no workers, for example.

So unlike its older brothers Caylus and Pillars of the Earth, A Castle for All Seasons suffers the vagaries of the “blind bid”. That is not necessarily a bad thing and it does add to the challenge trying to second-guess what other players are about to do. But for a lot of people this will be very off-putting; if you like total control and/or open information in your game you best pass this one over.

The key ways to score in the game are to build buildings and populate them. Building scores are instant and applied immediately whereas the placement of a “helper” in one of the built buildings, which together form the castle of the title, will not be scored until the last round is completed. Therein lie the subtleties of the game; while building is a guaranteed fixed score, population is indeterminate until the game is over. Of course, there are some situations which bring guaranteed scores ; if all the towers have been built before the gates are populated, then the players will know the gates are going to score the maximum, for example. However getting your helper in those locations before somebody else does is all a matter of timing. Another way to score involves the Master Builder – he scores when any other player builds in the same round. I feel this is a little hit-and-miss; if one player is lucky enough to time this right and the other three build then he’s just got fifteen points. Another player might luck out and get nothing. Sure, if you know the others are probably about to build, that is when you play it, but with blind action selection there’s no guarantee - and fifteen points is a big swing.

The big picture is that Castle is an excellent combination of building and blind action selection; there are numerous challenges there and attempting to strike the balance between building and populating the buildings (though you must always build before you can populate). However the game is yet another resource gathering and building experience; if you feel you have enough of that kind of game already then it’s perhaps best to give this one a miss.

Le Havre and Have Not.

2008-11-19T11:42:00.002Z

The first experience I had with Agricola, Lookout’s success from last year, left me feeling a little underwhelmed; though it did grow on me a bit more after a few plays. Right now I am rather underwhelmed by their latest release, Le Havre. Read on and you’ll find out why.

On starting my first game of Le Havre I immediately noticed a lack of elegance I just couldn’t get on with. When it comes to a player’s turn, they have to move their ship along a seven-space track to the next free space. Players do this in turn, with the net result that every space on the track is used before passing to the next one, each player in turn using the next space. In my opinion, things would have been less confusing if they had just included one ship for all players. Working out how many actions a player had remaining before the end of the round would have been just as easy, the overall mechanism would have been much easier.

Ostensibly Le Havre is a boardgame, however everything could have been done with just cards. Of course I prefer that chits were used for resources, but everything else really could have been incorporated into the decks. The vast majority of the board space acts as a store; now this isn’t a bad thing per se, but the board could have been dispensed with altogether. In fact, I think I would have liked player boards better as a form of resource tracking. It seems to me that much of the box contents is arbitrary and adds nothing – not even confusion, which is often quite useful in a game like this.

The kind of confusion that is present, is the wrong kind. What disappoints me more than anything else is that this is an experience game. In simpler words, unless you play it several times you can never know the best way to play. I know this could be said of other games, many other games in fact; however, a player’s whole strategy depends entirely on development in this game. Furthermore, that development depends on knowledge of the cards available. Arguably, this could be said of any game; but the great Puerto Rico is limited to two dozen buildings or so – and most of the time their function requires little or no explanation. Hence to play competitively (or even competently) players need to know what they require to build what, yet there is no clear information or player guide and there is only one copy of the almanac which explains the cards. Somebody preparing a decent player aid could alleviate many of the obstacles, but at the end of the day, with the way the building mechanisms behave in this game, players will still be spending a lot of time looking at the building stacks.

This puts me in a very difficult position; it means that I can’t make a reasonable decision on the quality of this game as I don’t know enough about it. It also means new players are likely to be severely turned-off when an experienced player shows them how it’s done.
The whole timing structure of the game is very restrictive; perhaps a bit too restrictive. It leaves players in a position where they spend much of their available actions looking desperately for ways to forage when they also really need to be gathering resources for building. Yes, this restriction makes the game what it is, but I feel the game would have been better had this been player-imposed rather than mechanism-imposed.

All of this could just be due to my evolution into a long-in-the-tooth gaming curmudgeon; it gets easier every year for me to find reasons not to like something. I will say however that despite all these issues I have with the game I did enjoy playing and trying to master the inherent challenges of the system. I just wish there was more challenge from other players. And I wish I hadn't queued up for two hours to get my copy!

Steel against Chicago

2008-11-13T16:20:00.002Z

It's inevitable they are going to be compared; two games on the same theme, both working towards similar concepts, both from different designers and coming from two parties previously involved in a controversial dispute.

Steel Driver and Chicago Express were both released in time for Essen this year. Steel Driver is one of the latest in Martin Wallace and Warfrog's Treefrog range. Chicago Express is a Queen Games reissue of Harry Wu's Wabash Cannonball, previously published by Winsome Games in their usual DTP - er, I mean "spartan" - fashion.

Visiting Essen, both games were in my list of "must-haves"; CE (Chicago Express) because I adore Queen Games' production values and I had heard so many good things about the gameplay of the prior design; SD (Steel Driver) because despite not knowing much about it, Martin Wallace is a sure bet and his rail games even surer. So I got them both; this means I will only have to choose between them with regard to what is actually going to be played right now.

Like rail games in general, SD and CE (formerly WC) employ both network building and economic elements. What's special in these cases is that they both utilise shareholding as a core element of play; heavily simplified forms of shareholding, not like the complex markets employed in the 18XX series of rail games. Another important fact here is that how you invest greatly affects the outcome of the game for you.

In CE every time a share is bought the money paid goes into the company's coffers, where it can then be used to expand the rail network and increase profits. In this respect the game behaves to some extent like its forefathers, insofar as the only money available for use is the money invested; but it is important to note that unlike the old 18XX series payouts only go to investors - never the company. Much of the bookkeeping has been abstracted away, so profits are never seen as such (forest hexes are an exception; putting money into the company directly) and building track, upgrading engines and operating are all condensed into a single action - the expansion action. This expansion costs money which comes from the company funds; so the more you pay for that share the more the railway company can expand.

SD also limits expansion in a similar fashion; however in this game money is not used to bid for them. Rather a limited supply of investment cubes is used. An investment cube has no real intrinsic value and is an abstraction designed to limit how wide a player can spread their interests. These cubes also limit how far a railway company can expand, as cubes are spent to build track. One interesting difference here is that money is used solely for scoring at the game end; another is that all companies have an equal number of share unlike CE's staggered approach (which gives the five different companies between two and six shares). Again, all the operational elements have been abstracted away; however there is more to connecting nodes in this game than dividends as I will discuss later.

The turn structure of SD follows the 18XX series more closely than CE; there is a round of investment, a round of expanding and a round in which dividends are gained. When it's time for expansion, the action is in a turn order determined by which railways acted during the prior turn - less expansion puts a railway company earlier in the turn order. Additionally, the expansion itself is carried out by the player who bought the one available share this round. Rail companies can expand one rail link at a time, until the current "operator" cannot or will not build any more - usually because there are not enough investment cubes to allow further expansion. Once expansion is done with, profits are paid out to the player currently controlling that company - not the other shareholders. This seems a little forced, something to discourage players driving companies into the ground without consequence, but it works in practice and the other shareholders will gain indirectly when they earn the final dividends at game end.

CE on the other hand allows rail company networks to be expanded by any player who wants to take the action; there are two limits to how far this can go; having enough cash to do so and up to a limit of three hexes. The latter restriciton seems a little artificial, but it stops one company runnning away with the game. In CE, the expansion can always be carried out by any player who chooses the action and owns at least one share in that company. CE's turn structure allows just one action per player, and after a number of actions dividend payouts are triggered bringing the game closer to an end and more money into it. It's a very elegant turn structure, unlike the old-fashioned phased approach, which manages to keep players involved at every step for little cost in effort.

In both games, shares are bought through auction. In CE such an auction is triggered by a player action; a company which still has shares available is chosen and the share is put up with a minimum opening bid of the post-sale dividend (total profit divided by issued shares - including the one up for auction). There is a direct limit on the number of shares that can be sold in a "round"; there can be three auctions maximum before another dividend is triggered. In contrast, SD allows only one share per company per round. A whole phase is devoted to this auctioning, in which players get to choose which they are putting up for auction before everybody bids. Where shares are concerned, the handling of the market in SD is the more elegant of the two. CE seems to follow a system where players have to work out the future worth of a particular share in order to price it - rather like valuing the paintings in Modern Art - and then deicde what they will pay. SD does not suffer this problem so much; throughout the game the players' investment power is limited and as only one share will become available every turn the issue is which one to go for rather than what they will be worth - a sort of relative worth if you will.

At game end CE is a little harsher; what you've earned during the game is what will (or will not) gain you victory. SD has a final profits round, in which majority control and how the network was built garner extra importance. This final round, a round of goods deliveries more akin to Canal Mania than Age of Steam, will ultimately decide the value of all of the shares the players bought during the game. This sets the precedent for players trading instant profits during the main game against final profits at the endgame; expand with goods shipments in mind and you will probably earn less instantly.

Finally there is the way networks are actually built on the board. SD represents the network in the form of regular links of different value - rather like Wallace's Volldampf - whereas CE uses abstracted connectivity in the form of occupying a hex - rather like, well, Hex. In both cases the networks may only be extended from the existing network; in both cases profits/dividends/income are adjusted according to values printed on the board as the network expands.

I have tried to summarise the salient points of both games here; now for my preference. CE has an interesting economic model; the game reminds me of an interesting combination of Modern Art and Stephenson's Rocket. A particular rail company must expand and sell its shares to increase its worth, and keep on doing so over and over. SD has an interesting trade-off between short-term profits and long-term investment; however the economic model is not so interesting. What SD does have, however, is a perceptible tightness in both investment and expansion that seems less prevalent in CE. There is also less certainty present in SD; I found that in CE you can generally sense (if not calculate quickly in one's head) which player is going to win around two dividend payouts before the end. You can never be sure, but at the same time there is not much you can do to turn it around. SD felt competitive right up to the final profit; I don't think it's just a matter of taste here and I don't think the last round has just been thrown in to shake up the tightness of earlier rounds either; it just feels like every single move matters. In all it's not the most elegant of the two, I just feel SD does it better, with more fun.

So there you are, I fall on the side you probably thought I would (if you're aware of my self-professed Wallace fanboyism); SD is my favourite. But I have to say before I finish that CE is a great design too; I own both and will continue to play both. Remember, it is simply a more elegant version of one of Mr Wallace's earlier efforts, so it can't be far wrong...

Essen - A Negative Angle

2008-10-22T13:59:00.001+01:00

So here we are, enjoying the October rain (to go with the rain we had all Summer - in England at least) and preparing for another spectacular Internationalen Spieltage at Essen. All those designers, all those publishers, all those activities and all those people clamouring for the latest and greatest that the worldwide boardgames industry can offer.

Some will tell you this is Utopia, this is Oz, this is Heaven for gamers. If you are a gamer and you are going to attend this year I can guarantee you will be like a kid in a sweetshop. You will want more than you can carry and there will be more there than you can possibly want.

It is a great and exciting event. But wait - I think I better warn you that Essen is not all it's cracked up to be. Read on and you will discover that lurking beneath the veneer of excitement and anticipation is a dark and terrible underbelly - you may never wish to visit again (or at all). I am about to dispell the myths about Essen, the things nobody tells you when they encourage you to break out your life-savings and make the journey over.

"Essen is the greatest event in the gaming calendar."

I would personally put particular conventions I attend within the confines of the UK above Essen any day. You see while I have to admit I am that kid in the sweetshop when I go over (all of once so far - at least until next week - but that's enough to develop an informed opinion), there is always something niggling at the back of my mind about what I'm actually doing there. I'm out shopping.

Now if you're the kind of chap who, to keep the peace at least, wanders around trailing his spouse through boutique after boutique, being forced into giving your uninformed opinion about what clothes are nice just to be told you don't know what you're talking about then you will be some way into understanding.

Don't get me wrong; the haggling, the bargaining, the rush of the sale - it's all good. But with thousands of people to deal with nobody really wants to bargain with you. Well, they do and they don't; if you want a bargain then the price you pay is to hang around until all the good stuff's gone (more on that later). So while Essen may seem on the surface to be the gaming event of the year, it's just a glorified shopping trip.

"There are always titles you will get at Essen you'll never get anywhere else."

I have to agree with this, because it's actually true - but it only really applies to a minority of titles. The whole point of this fair is exposure for the designers and publishers (mainly publishers), so everybody (with the noteable exception of a few deliberately small publishing houses) is trying to get their game into the larger market.

Most of the titles you get which are rare, Essen one-offs will probably never make the cut for major publication. Sure, one or two self-published titles may go on to something bigger, but most won't; they'll fall by the wayside and will have no meaning to anybody but the avid collector.

So perhaps they're worth getting just for the rarity, but if the game isn't going anywhere it may be the case it just isn't worth having. And the games that are worth having, well you could probably wait until the game becomes available at your local stockist or online.

You just know in all the excitement I'm going to ignore this philosophy tomorrow.

"You save lots of money going to Essen."

Well, I could kind of accept this to a point - postage is costly for the quantity you will buy, accommodation isn't really expensive in the grand scheme of things and (for me at least) it's not too far to Germany. But you'd do well to actually save money at all after your expenses are taken into account. Remember you have to get in, you have to eat and drink at some time, you have to get from the hotel to the fair and you'll probably be best advised to take something back for the Missus (unless you brought her with you - more costs!). On balance I reckon you'd be better off staying at home.

"But the bargains you get in the fair make up for it."

There will be very few bargains. The strength (or rather "weakness" at the moment) of British Sterling compounds this for those of you travelling from the UK. Add in a few related minor costs and you might as well say £1=1€. What would have cost me £30 last year is going to cost me £35 this year.

Apart from that (which is beyond the control of the publishers and traders, to be fair), you don't get something for nothing anywhere. You might get a few Euros off one title if you buy the other that isn't selling so well. You might be able to knock down that second-hand copy of the game you were after a few years ago to something mopre in keeping with a new copy. You might even find you can bag a copy of one of those old titles, which fell by the wayside and were passed over for republication, for nothing more than a few Euros. But if you're going for the new titles, the specific titles you want because they're potential classics or they're known to be good (at least by some of the pundits) then I'm afraid you're probably going to have to pay top dollar for them.

Thinking on, though, I wonder if the "credit crunch" will count in the gamers' favour. Less disposable income generally means fewer purchases, means more immutable stock, means greater price-drops. But with only four days to decide whether that's going to happen - forget it!

"What about all those freebies then, you miserable old git?"

What about them? They're generally limited, they're generally minor expansions and quite often they're included in future expansions. I don't want expansions anyway - unless I need them because the base game just isn't good enough.

"Oh come on, you got a few bargains last year."

Yes, I did. Mostly what bargains I got went to others, either because they requested them or because I gave them as gifts. The only real bargain I got for myself was a shop-soiled copy of Hive; I already had a copy anyway so it would seem this was an unnecessary purchase (but my other copy is the wooden original).

Well as miserable as I am, I'm here now so I'll be as excited as a kid in a sweetshop - or the sweetshop owner who just noticed dozens of excited kids outside his sweetshop. So you might as well ignore everything I just said, because I will.

The Secret of Nim?

2008-10-09T12:45:00.001+01:00

Or do games just boil down to Tic Tac Toe?

When you sit down and think about it, there isn't a lot to board games; a slack handful of pieces, a board to play on and a set of rules. Often the rules are convoluted, full of incremental actions which make up a single turn, of die rolls and card plays, of auctions and sales, and of point gains and losses. Everything about a boardgame can seem rather overwhelming.

But really, when the mask is removed to reveal the true face of a game all you have is something simple, like Nim. Nim is a two-player counting game involving stacks or heaps of tokens; on a player's turn he must remove at least one token from any one stack and as many from the same stack as he likes. The loser will be the player who removes the last token from the table - or in other words the player who leaves all stacks empty. It's an easy enough game to learn, and the solution has long since been around. Tic Tac Toe is another solved game; apart from being different in play and objective it's solution is also a bit different in that the result will always be a tie.

Now I wouldn't be the first to criticise many of the games us gamers play as being perhaps a bit too processional, or possessing "killer strategies"; but what concerns me is if this is becoming the norm rather than the exception. What I am asking is, if we play a game enough to eke out fixed approaches and stratagies, does what remains become more like Nim (or even Tic Tac Toe)? I mean, can a player totally control what happens in any game to the point where random elements become necessary to differentiate it from nothing more than a simple, solved strategy? If so, does this mean games are becoming too simple for our tastes, or are we just getting better at playing them?

Take for example Cluedo; a classic if there ever was one which involves the nesting of a card-based deduction mechanism into an outer shell of moving around a big house. If a number of equally capable players are involved and get all the rolls they require to get to the rooms they need to make suggestions with, then it's likely they will reach a solution as to who commited murder, where and with what at around the same time. Then the win comes down to one thing - turn order. Whichever payer plays next will win the game outright. Sure, you could gamble on whether the weapon was the revolver or the candlestick; that would get you the jump on everybody. But my point is not so much about gambling and guesswork, it's about everybody being capable of finishing at the same time but only one being allowed to - and winning as a direct result of that turn order.

Actually this is less of a problem in Cluedo than it is in, say, Mystery of the Abbey. The latter game is more of an information gathering and deduction game, in that players don't use subterfuge as directly as in Cluedo. This usually means that the revelation of who the culprit was dawns on everybody at the same time; then it's a race to the chapter house to perform with a flourish your accusations. And the winner of that race will usually be down to the turn order. Don't confuse what I am saying; it is a fun race to be involved in, but the build-up seems to be a little too heavy to have the final result determined by the order of play.

There is perhaps no real answer to this problem; if any one player can manage to position himself in the right place at the right time then victory is almost certainly assured. Just like a player will know the best his opponent can hope for is a draw if he moves first in Tic Tac Toe, or if the player on his right reveals the last crucial piece of information in Mystery of the Abbey. It may be the case the player has skilfully managed to do this; the player has succeeded in seeing through the entire game's structure and decided to manoeuvre himself into the correct opportunistic position to take advantage of it. It's more likely the game has a flaw or two which can be taken advantage of too easily.

Most games try to get over this kind of problem through their natural, incremental structure; this usually leaves bits sticking out that players can trip up on, like the tile-draw in Tigris & Euphrates or the production in Age of Steam - elements beyond control, randomising elements if you will. But then aren't we just removing some degree of skill from the game to make up for something that couldn't be designed around - a lack of simultaneity? Not really; well, not in my opinion anyway. As I see it these random elements are just adding variance to the value of the controlled actions of the players. They are usually evident in games in which the strategies which must be approached are clear, not necessarily games in which the strategies are fixed.

The incremental structure of games like Age of Steam manages to convert the whole problem of turn order into its own mechanism Not only do the players have to buy their position in Age of Steam, they may also use one of several special actions which temporarily reconfigure the turn order at any one of those incremental points. Thus even though a player can know for sure they will at least be second in the order if they bid enough, they can never be first in everything. This is one of the best solutions around, but by no means perfect; this latter part is particularly true of Age of Steam, where a seasoned player will not only be able to choose the correct actions throughout the game but will also try to ensure he is in the correct place in the turn order to ensure he is in a position to choose them. The player who manages to do this will probably win, as long as nobody else is managing to do the same; so we have essentially another game here where the turn order will have a crucial effect on the outcome.

Many people can remember the turn order "problem" in Puerto Rico; that the first player in a game is disadvantaged because of the manner in which the order of play changes each turn. Subsequent designs in a similar vein have managed to successfully alleviate this through the use of various mechanisms; for example Caylus fixed the order of execution and allowed an action to alter the order in which workers were placed. Even so, there is now a new sequence of events which, if an astute player can influence them, he can turn them to his own ends.

Thus, when you put things in perspective, it becomes quite clear that not only the choices made but the point in time at which they occur are important to deciding the victor. And best of all, if you can brush aside all of the complexities in a game such that it becomes a matter of deciding how many sticks to pick up and when, then the outcome of any strategy game will be as determinate as Nim.

Yes, I'm Still Alive!

2008-10-08T10:27:00.002+01:00

I never really thought I'd make it past forty at one point in my life; yet here I am alive and well and living the nightmare, following my Birthday last week. I know I had gone quiet for a while on this blog; I have been in a difficult position with respect to writing anything over the past ten months, recently the intensity of this difficulty has made things even worse.

But watch this space, it might get interesting very soon.

Emergency Games Bag

2008-07-09T15:45:00.004+01:00

I have been constantly wrestling with obstacles to my gaming pleasure; storage is a big one (always going into detail on how I have too many games), unplayed games another and struggling to attend as many sessions I would like another. Missing out on all this actual playing time often leaves me at a loose end, and a couple of weeks back I decided to use my non-gaming time to approach a concept I had been toying with for some time.

Have you ever hit that situation during a session where either nobody can decide what to play or you have run out of options? Have you ever attended a session where everybody expected somebody else to bring something along? Well that's the idea behind the Emergency Game Bag!

The Emergency Game Bag (EGB) is intended to fill in the gaps. If you have no time to go trawling through your massive, four-figure collection the EGB is for you. If you were waiting to play to play the latest thing in resource management but the owner didn't bring it along the EGB is for you. Even if you're just stuck waiting for a group member and you need something to be going on with the EGB is for you.

The first thing you need for your EGB is a bag - any bag will do as long as you can fit games in it. My bag is a humongous sports bag. Size is important here, but at the end of the day the EGB has to be tailored to your own individual needs; my EGB - a humongous sports bag - will fit eight standard square boxes (such as those used for big box Kosmos, mid-sized box FFG and regular Days of Wonder games) with room to spare for a few more small items.

The next step is to decide on how many games will go into the EGB - too many makes deciding what to play even more difficult so if you have a bag like mine that takes a few bigger boxes then that is exactly what you should put in there. Lots of smaller, denser games would weigh down your EGB so more is less; but there's nothing wrong with including a few.

Now you have to think about the quality of your content. To choose the games which would be a "best fit" for your EGB you first have to consider the player mix. Pick games which will collectively cater for the range of players at any group or groups you attend for games sessions. Because you will have a few different games, they need not all cater for the entire range of numbers; but as a whole your EGB should. Try to leave some choice, so that for any number of seats you have two or three games to choose from. More than three is probably likely if you have around half a dozen games in your bag and you're considering mid-range numbers like four; that shouldn't be a problem.

Now consider game lengths; a short game should last no more than half an hour, a long game can be three hours plus. Game length often has the number of players as a key factor so it's likely you're already there with this one, but you want to try to get a good range of playing times - preferably one short, one long and one in the middle for each number of players.

Having considered that, you should consider weight - in the game sense rather than the mass sense. The weight of each game has likely already been decided by the playing time and the number of players, but try to include light, medium and heavy games for all player numbers.

Pick games for your EGB that you know (or think you know) nobody else in the group owns. This may be easier said than done; if you're lucky enough to belong to a group where nobody buys anything somebody else already has a copy of then you're fine, but for me it means PR and AoS saty out of the bag.

Penultimately you should consider the game types and/or themes. This is more about avoiding games that are too similar than anything else; if all of your three-player games are race games then somebody who dislikes them is going to reject your EGB. Your mix for each number of players should include pure strategy, beer-and-pretzels, resource management, racing, set collection, auction and cooperative games; but be sure to exclude those types that nobody will ever play (which is why I never mentioned dexterity games - that applies to our group only though, your mileage may vary). This could be the most difficult part because it's highly likely these attributes are going to belong to different games.

Finally, try to consider packing games in your EGB that everybody already knows how to play. This is not always going to be that easy, but then again if it really is an emergency learning something new may become a necessity.

And that's all there is to it. In a later post I will upload some pictures of my EGB so you can see how easy it will be to put one together. The beauty of it is its simplicity; you can keep it in a corner and just grab it as you go, you can keep it in the boot of your car, you can carry it around with you and pretend you're off to the gym (although my bag is probably heavy enough I will never need to go to the gym). Happy gaming!

More Thoughts on Realism

2008-07-03T11:25:00.002+01:00

"realism noun SPECIALIZED: paintings, films, books, etc. that try to represent life as it really is."

The last time I wrote about realism, it was a fairly simplistic look at why something - a game - can convey realism despite being rather elegant and lacking layer upon layer of chrome or detail. It can cut both ways, of course; just one missing detail can throw the baby out with the bathwater and leave a game which lacks something.

Taking a step back to get the whole picture sometimes reveals something about a game which at first seemed to fit quite well and yet, in the overall model, fails to produce the desired effect. However in the vast majority of complaints about realism it is the individual points, the minutiae and details, that fail to deliver.

Contributors to realism

Let me ask you a question; of the following components which is the most realistic?

I'll give you the answer as we go on, but for now consider a few benefits to each approach. The tank on the left has an aesthetic quality about it. It looks like a tank, it is coloured green in a similar fashion to that of the army it represents, it is identifiable as representing a Sherman M4 tank and though it stops short of actually moving and firing itself all players can be fairly certain what we're representing with this component is an armoured fighting vehicle (AFV) of some description if not a unit of AFV's.

Second along is a wooden block. It's a square wooden block with enough depth that it can stand on its edge. As a wooden block itself bears little resemblance to a tank, a sticker has been placed on it to show it represents some form of AFV or a unit thereof. The sticker is only on this side of the block, so if anybody observes it from the other side they cannot tell what it is. Another point to note is that there are indexes and values on the sticker which represent various things.

Third is a cardboard counter depicting a silhouette of an AFV of some description. This counter is designed to lie flat. There are what are known as "stats" on the counter, representing values assigned to some of the attributes of the AFV; I suspect in this case armour, movement and firepower (though of course they will not necessarily be in that order). To see what this counter represents a player can simply view it.

Finally there is a wooden disc with not one single indication as to what it actually represents. it shows no stats, no picture, no symbol and no orientation. If you flip it over it will be exactly the same. You can't stand it on its edge as it will roll off the table. It's just an ordinary disc.

While components often do not directly affect the level of realism in a game, they are a direct reflection of it. It is, however, a misconception that particular use of a type of component and any underlying system is unrealistic in simulative terms. Take the tank miniature for instance; it bears no data whatsoever on how far it might move, how effective its armour is or what the range and penetrative effects of its fire might be. That doesn't mean the system isn't in place for that; furthermore we can still use the miniature to record position, direction and status of the vehicle (or unit) it represents. Looking at the other end, at the disc, not only is it missing stats but it is also devoid of any means of indicating what the unit type is, its direction, its status and its location. The disc could quite easily represent a single tank, a tank platoon or an entire brigade; the indicators for this would have to come from external sources.

For large scale, strategic-level conflicts, the disc would probably work realistically - provided of course that the rules, the scenario and the in-game narrative are all woven well around it. The disc has been used to represent military units in a number of games, often abstracted to a body of nondescript size and composition, but with a specific approximation of effectiveness as represented by the disc.

For small-scale tactical play, the miniature tank will work much better than a plain old disc, mainly for the reasons stated earlier regarding its intrinsic indication of facing, status and unit type. As the level of play transcends from tactical to operational, then the area covered changes and the scale changes with it. At this point counters ought to be considered a better alternative, with the added advantage that more diverse unit types can be employed more usefully as all the unit data can be seen at a glance on the counter.

To use counters to effectively simulate units of different types, an associated ruleset is required by which the data on the counters can be translated into meaningful game elements, devices and mechanisms. In most wargames these rules cover such areas as attack, defence, movement, influence (often called "zone of control"), status, morale, effectiveness and/or readiness. But not all rulesets will do this; despite there being a general accepted standard in the wargame that logistic and psychological elements should at least be glossed over, many games dispense with them altogether. When it's a game such as Diplomacy then that's fine; the scale is so great that the abstraction to a basic strength comparison works well and reflects the dilemma the short-sighted military doctrine that history represents. When it's a close-combat, tactical game in which these are perhaps the lead reasons for one side's breaking then ignoring them is a big mistake.

The block, labelled on one side, is a good example of fitting the rules and the components together to create the desired simulative effect. It does this on two counts; fog of war and combat efffectiveness. As attacks are made, effectiveness is reduced such that the opponent can never be sure as to the effectiveness of the unit until it has been reduced to an ineffective state. Each unit has a full strength of four, going down to a lowest strength of 1. As abstract as this may seem - going from four to three means one quarter of the unit's effective strength is lost (perhaps temporarily, depending on the game) but there is no real detail as to what this actually entails in the tactical situation it represents - it can be strongly argued that this induces a degree of realism beyond the printed counter with a two-state effectiveness (full strength and reduced strength) that has so commonly been used before. Then again, there will be numerous instances in which two states of effectiveness are all you need (not counting complete elimination of course); a lone tank is hence either fully operational, immobilised or knocked-out.

And then we're back to the tank miniature. Look at the use of this in, say, Memoir '44; a game widely acknowledged to be at best a light wargame, at worst child's play. The tank miniatures used in Memoir '44 cannot necessarily be said to represent individual AFV's; rather they represent units, and the number of tanks present represent that unit's effectiveness.

So the answer to my question above is that none of the components is truly more realistic than any other; it's simply a matter of context. That context is provided by the rules of the game, which will be written in one of a number of ways to sit precariously in the narrow spectrum between simulation and abstraction.

Sacrifices have to be made

There will always be difficulty with introducing detail into a ruleset; the biggest hurdle is doing so without hurting anything else. If we consider something ultimately tactical in nature, the combat systems of role-playing games (RPG's - which are, as every scholar knows, the bastard offspring of wargames), some early systems employed simple combat results tables (CRT's) on which the roll of a twenty-sided die (d20) would be cross-referenced with the protection value of the target (often termed "armour class" (AC) and if a hit was registered then damage applied, rolling dice according to the weapon used, to the hit-points of the target.

As these games were ongoing, a system to reflect the personal development of player-characters (usually "experience points") emerged. This allowed players to rise through the ranks of their profession; with every rise they would become harder to kill, more skilled at killing and capable of inflicting more damage to a target. The knock-on effect was that the challenge for players deteriorated dramatically; this in turn resulted in designers and game-masters alike producing even more formidable enemies. All this led to the indirect alteration of the system adopted initially of rolling against AC. Instead of the AC running from 1 up (or 10 down to 1 - the details escape me at the moment), the CRT had to be altered to allow for values at and below 0 - the lower the better.

To me this has always been wrong, and the whole experience-related debacle drove me from one RPG to another in an endless quest for realism. I opted for a highly-detailed RPG which was at the time in its second edition - Chivalry & Sorcery. This second edition had got rid of the AC-based CRTcombat system it had previously used, and adopted a system whereby the chance of inflicting damage depended on a combination of the skill of the attacker, the type of weapon and the type of armour on the defender. Furthermore, there were hit points and fatigue points, the latter allowing a player to absorb damage through dodging, ducking and rolling with the punches rather than taking physical wounds. In an advanced version of combat, players could adopt a particular stance which would then affect both their chances of a successful attack and their chances of sustaining a hit from the enemy. If you wanted even more incremental detail, you could use percentile dice (d100) rather than a d20.

To reflect all of this, there was a separate CRT for each weapon type. If your character was using a pole-axe, then you would turn to the pole arms page and run your finger down to "Pole-Axe", find out if the reach was greater than the opposing weapon, ensure it was a faster weapon to use, figure out the base chance to hit, adjust it for the skill level of the character with a pole arm, apply bonuses and penalties for stance, check the base damage, apply bonuses and penalties for armour (having thumbed through to the armour page) and then, after all the data had been collated, roll the dice. Then it was a matter of deducing whether the target was fatigued, devoid of morale, running away or about to stick it to your character with his poised morning-star flail.

When it's taken you all evening to resolve a single encounter in a game in which combat is just one small element, you start asking yourself why you left that bland, basic AC-based CRT to begin with. I know why - completely farcical combat situation without an ounce of realism - which is why I will probably never ever play AD&D (or any associated system) again in my life. The fact is that everything that went into those "more realistic" systems, while good, was also very time-consuming to the point that ten seconds of action could take up to half an hour to resolve. While I found much of the detail interesting in theory, in practice it just didn't work as I would have liked it.

Lengthy combat resolution is not something that makes a wargame more realistic; but the elements that take up your time resolving a conflict often are. Thus, to reach a level of realism that would be acceptable there has to be some trimming away; chrome is a fine element to introduce, but overdo it and the whole game will become bogged-down with relatively pointless die-roll modifiers (DRM's) and, even worse, relatively pointless subsystems. Likewise, trim away too much and the skeleton you are left with may be far too abstracted from the reality you're trying to achieve.

Bitter and Sweet

It's quite possible that far too many gamers put stock in how realistic a game is (particularly when it comes to wargames) and I have to say I am one of them. This usually means I will frequently put forward that which I stated in my previous post on this subject; in summary that the level of abstraction in a game should be taken into account when one is trying to define it's level of realism.

It would seem that many wargamers display contempt towards something like, say, Memoir '44 for its simplicity; usually the reason being it is far too simple to be called a wargame therefore it must be a children's game. Notwithstanding, if you add enough extras, exceptions and special rules to the basic Command and Colours (C&C) system it becomes a very complex structure indeed. While the basic underlying system is, well, basic, the addition of all these expansions and extras introduce more branches to the decision tree. This can turn what was once a fairly elegant abstraction of warfare into something a little more colourful and also a touch more challenging. A small example would be the commisar rule from the Eastern Front expansion; any orders given are to be carried out at all costs, so the orders you give (card you play) this turn must be followed up next turn.

Now clearly there's a long way to go before complexities like those present in other wargames become a problem for the Memoir '44 afficianado, and due to the nature of the game that will never happen. The designer here is, quite rightly, keeping himself loyal to the core system. But should Mr Borg ever decide he wants a more realistic and detailed version then you can bet with some certainty the resultant game will lose alll of the charm, pace and finesse of the current C&C system used.

You can guarantee that as a game gets more simulative, its rules will become more complex; this will mean more time to play it. Whether this would be due to having to make more checks during your turn, or just looking up rules all of the time is neither here nor there - time (and hence downtime) will be increased. One way to deal with this is to simplify the in-game operations, but this can remove some of the simulative elements some folk enjoy. To get an idea of what I mean, look at the following:

The first diagram shows a fairly realistic system involving morale, the second is a more simplified version of the same check. Both achieve the same result, but clearly the steps involved in the more complex system give the player a full picture of what is happening to his troops. The latter, simpler system will be much quicker to resolve but lacks the detail of the first. If a player finds pleasure in such minutiae, the latter system will disappoint. One can conclude from this that where realism is concerned we have to take the bitter with the sweet; both systems are realistic, but one pays for time with detail and another pays for detail with time.

Barking up the wrong tree

There is often great difficulty in defining realism with respect to wargames; essentially this is because wargames follow a subjective field of endeavour known as "the battlefield". Argue a wargame is "realistic" or "realistic enough" and you will be faced with an army of objections ranging from "But the morale rules don't really work as they should" through "There is far too much chaos in the game system" to "How the hell would you know that - were you at Omaha Beach?" All this sort of makes me feel like pointing out how they are stating the obvious, but I don't, because I've done it myself many, many times.

I'm sure everybody knows realism is not something that is to be expected of a handful of counters on a hexgrid, yet we still all get up on our soapbox about it. But perhaps we should look not at how realistic a game system behaves, rather we should look at it from another angle and ask ourselves, "Does the level of abstraction go too far?"

I would think more often than not the answer would be no; yet there will be those who complain it does about various games in which, if you take away that abstraction, you could open a whole new can of worms. Tide of Iron, for example, is a tactical-level wargame set in the late Second World War pitting American forces against German forces. There have been many complaints about armour facing, mortars and other weapon behaviour (particularly machine-guns); but were we to change any one of those things there would be a chain reaction which would upset the rest of the rules. Subsequently more detail would be necessary to the rest of the game and if an acceptable median between simulation and abstraction is not reached then realism will remain as shaky as it was to begin with.

If we introduce rules governing armour facing by giving stronger armour to the front of a tank and weaker to the rear, we then have to change several other rules at once to fit - including all vehicle movement rules, armour movement allowance and effective fire to the side and rear from a tank. Taking just one of those - let's say armour movement allowance - we then have to introduce further rules regarding manoeuvrability in different terrain, moving backwards (because now there is a backwards) and tank overrun (which may be removed altogether and hence have other repercussions). At this point one has to ask if such development is worth it in the long run; it's probably best to leave well alone and if such detail is desired pick another system in which that has already been dealt with.

Essentially my point here is that if you want to add a more simulative and/or realistic element to a game you must be aware that this will force you to make other drastic changes to a core system. In turn this will probably require other changes, which will then require changes themselves and force a chain reaction. Be very careful what you wish for, you just might get it.

Conclusion

The desire for realism in a game should never be marred by losing sight of the goal. If a game is not realistic enough for you, then don't try to overcomplicate it by changing rules which would not necessarily add anything but complexity. If a small element of a game is unrealistic, don't try to fix it because it's probably the best compromise the designer could reach. And the most important point of all, simulation does not equate to realism; if a system doesn't measure the level of blood-loss in every individual soldier that doesn't mean it isn't realistic at its level of accuracy. So be safe, keep well, and may you totally and utterly defeat your enemy in every battle you make.

This Game's a Hidden Treasure!

2008-06-16T17:45:00.001+01:00

Frequent game sessions do little to reduce the list of unplayed titles the player-collector possesses, particularly when the group's attendance is usually too high for the games you crave to try out on them. Thebes is one of many games Mike had been trying to introduce to the rest of us since October last year, and one we finally got to play in February (yes it is some time ago, but things have been busy).

The second year begins, and my knowledge of all things Palestinian increases.

Thebes is a game about early Nineteenth-century archeology, a time when ancient lands sprang to life as adventurers and scholars alike uncovered valuable artefacts in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Following this boom which produced terms such as Egyptology and Pyramidiocy, players have to first research antiquity then embark on archeological expeditions in order to dig for treasures. Having gathered a collection, players display them at museums in European cities for the cultured West to see. If they're lucky, they will earn even more prestige by delivering lectures.

But all these things take time, thus the passage of time is the central mechanism to the game. Some of you may be familiar with Around the World in 80 Days, where time would be spent to travel between points on the map and the eightieth day would mark not the end of the game but the limit allowed for any player to successfully finish. This mechanism is a little similar; the main differences (and once again it's the differences which are important) being that players can spend as much time as they like on their turn and the order in which players carry out their actions is set by their relative positions on the time track.

A player may first move to another city (which costs time) and then has to carry out an action. This action could be to utilise one of the available cards; the cost in time is spent and the card actioned. Some cards increase knowledge in a particular field of archaeology, colour coded acording to the historic region they represent; others increase general knowledge (which may be applied to any field). The action that, in the main, earns you victory points is starting a dig.

To start a dig, you have to first visit one of the sites of antiquity - Cairo, Athens, Thebes, Palestine and so on. Once you are there, you decide how long you will be digging for. Based on a formulation of this allotted time and the gathered knowledge of the site in which the dig is taking place, a number of draws are made from the relevant bag for that location. Each draw could reveal just soil (a blank disc) or treasure of one of various values. The best bit is that the soil will be left where it is, making it progressively difficult to find anything of value, hence forcing players to spend more time digging.

My treasures gain me fame through exhibiting.

Of course, once a player has run out of time he will be unable to spend it and it's a case of waiting to see if everybody else fares better. This mechanism is one of the best examples of working and innovative in-game function I have seen for some time. And believe me I have spent a lot of time looking at them.

When a player has enough treasures, he will want to earn more points by exhibiting them. When the appropriate cards are revealed a player with a sufficiently significant collection can visit the relevant city and score big points for it. There is a minimum treasure required for this, dictated by the exhibition card. Having the best treasure from any one region is important here, as a player must possess an impressive collection to score.

Mike dominates in Egyptology and gathers lots of treasure as a result.

Thebes as a whole evokes the feeling of competing for that great archeological find very well; players are always faced with the choice of making small points quickly or building their knowledge that will move them towards the greatest treasure.

Thoughts on Realism

2008-04-17T09:31:00.000+01:00

Quite often the same old argument rears its ugly head. How much realism is there in this game or that? Is it realistic enough? Is it too realistic? Does realism add too much complexity?

The question is being raised more and more these days because of the latest trends in wargames. ASL has regained some of its old popularity, more card-driven titles are surfacing and plastic armies are sweeping across the board in fast-playing skirmishes.

To get to the point, there are two broad-spectrum wargaming philosophies; realism and playability. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive - contrary to popular belief - because a game can still be very easily played and still provide an excellent simulation. It's all a matter of exactly what you wish to simulate and to what level. Before I go any further, let's just make sure you know what I mean when I use these two terms. Realism is how well the game system simulates what happens (or is supposed to happen) in real life; playability is the right combination of elegance, flow, story-arc and engagement the game gives to its players to ensure the game remains just that - a game.

As I stated these are not necessarily mutually exclusive; a combat system may introduce more chrome than you can shake a stick at, which is almost guaranteed to reduce the elegance of the game system, yet still be very playable because such detail engages the players. However it cannot be argued that the factors which make a game more playable will, if introduced, have a negative effect on realism.

It all goes without saying, really; but what I am trying to sift out of all of this is whether it actually matters or not. Take for example a really elegant combat system I just thought up:

1. Pick an attacking infantryman.
2. Pick a target infantryman.
3. Roll a die.
4. If the result is 5 or more the target is removed.

It doesn't sound very realistic, does it? However if there was ever a war where the mean survivability of the infantryman under fire was around two-thirds then it could arguably represent a realistic - allbeit bland and simple - combat system. If somewhere this is expressed as a percentage I could substitute percentile dice and present a similarly realistic (but overly-simplistic and not very playable) measure. I don't know if there ever was such a war, I was simply using that assumption to illustrate my thoughts. At its level of detail this system produces fairly accurate results; we don't know how quickly the defender evades or is killed, how far he may have moved, whether cover had an effect or not but the realism is in the result. This is a rather black-box system, and as far from a simulation of the action as we can possibly get; however the result is in this sense simulatively realistic.

The big issue with this black box realism is there is nothing to indicate its functionality but the output (the result of a combat roll). If we were to add in rules for cover, weapon used, position, range to target and the state of the target (prone, standing, running away, pinned and so on) then we would have a lot more to do but the whole activity of attack would feel more like the real thing - more simulative so to speak. However this approach induces more issues with realism.

You see, there are often certain assumptions made about how combat evolves; while many of these assumptions can be left as they are and still produce a good approximation of realism, many others will have the opposite effect. There are those which induce gamey behaviour - the style of play follows the dictates of the ruleset - but that goes without saying for most rulesets and is very difficult to overcome through rules alone. However gamey behaviour is not the problem where realism is sought, or at least it isn't as great a problem as the game-based realism that many have adopted from years of playing by ill-fitting rulesets.

I suppose what I'm really saying here is that not all wargamers are historians or military buffs and after years and years of wargaming they start to conclude certain elements (usually those we see as standard in many wargames) are the norm. Their assumptions on realism are then based on the models they have experienced rather than the empirical evidence of history and current military doctrine. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the wrong way to look at it; a "zone of control" rule might not necessarily apply to certain types of conflict, the expected behaviour of armour in a tactical-level wargame might not necessarily match reality just because that's how tanks worked in the other game you played and - most importantly - just because a rule looks at the result of a skirmish from the alternative viewpoint of target survivability rather than effective firepower doesn't make it wrong.

Baycon 2008 - The UK's Premier Games Convention

2008-04-14T20:33:00.000+01:00

It was a hectic few months late last year and early this year for me and my family. The house has become a great source of pain as one small job has escalated into several large ones, I have been forced to make a career change after my former employer made me redundant and there was a death in the family just a couple of weeks ago. Despite all this I managed to make my annual pilgrimage the weekend after Easter to Devon for Baycon, the UK's premier gamers convention.

My timbers were shivered.

Because I had to attend a funeral the day before it all started, I turned up a couple of hours later than usual. I hadn't missed much, the hotel was running late in preparing the rooms and the lads from our group, Mike and Neil, had only just managed to complete their first game. As they started their second, I decided to take a wander round for twenty minutes while my room was made available, pay the required entrance fee for the convention and say hello to a few of the regulars.

Die Macher - it honestly looks more complicated than it is.

Usually when I attend this convention I play whatever people throw at me, but this year I decided I wanted to get a couple of titles I'd been sitting on for a while out on the table. Thanks to Howard, I managed to get both of the long games I hadn't tried before played on Friday and Saturday morning respectively. Howard gladly offered his services when three of us - Steve, Neil and me - expressed a wish to play Die Macher but would prefer if somebody who knew the ropes took us through it. On Friday morning through to Friday afternoon this was our game of choice. After the Green Party (my party) dominated most of the early elections and maintained the strongest party membership, the closing stages of the game left them high and dry. Howard's SDP took the national election after clever use of his media resources left his party most in line with the nation-wide public opinion. It's hard to fathom just how involving and appealing a game like Die Macher is when you're aware beforehand its theme is political and its playing time comparatively long; but I have to say it was everything I never expected it to be - an engrossing game of strategy with some interesting challenges. It makes me pleased to know that not everything I got from Valley Games will be as disappointing as Container (not that Container is a bad game - it isn't, I just felt it didn't meet with my idea of satisfaction).

Things aren't so complex to start with...

On Saturday morning we arranged to play Indonesia, something I had sat idle on it's shelf since I obtained a copy at Baycon 2007. Once again Howard had volunteered his services as instructor and once again the game lasted all morning; but thhis time it ate its way into the afternoon. Not a bad thing by any standards, and a most enjoyable and challenging economic game. But I warn you the downtime with this one is phenomenal. In the later game we all developed a habit of taking a break from the table and having a wander round to see what everybody else was playing. Indonesia is fantastic, but the accounting really needs to be cut down severely.

Near the start of the rail age.

Saturday evening when I was at a loose end, I found myself playing Brass with Howard and Steve. A most excellent game this was, slightly marred before the start by extensive discussions over whether one could build a rail link from Birkenhead, but overwhelmingly appealing up the very close final result. I managed to build a high level shipyard in Liverpool on my last turn, having watched both other players dominate the transport networks for most of the rail age, and in doing so I managed to prevent Steve from doing the same. The shipyard was still available in Birkenhead, but for the other two players it was not to be - no railhead had been established on the Wirral so no coal would reach Cammell Lairds. If only I had managed to garner a few more points in transport I might have took Steve's canal age lead from him - it wasn't a great lead, about four points as I recall. A great game, I must play again soon.

Steve brought his copy of Agricola - interesting.

One of the big hits of Baycon, from my viewpoint at least, was Galaxy Trucker. If you read my Essen report a few months ago you will know I managed to bag a copy of it over there; well it took right up until Baycon to get to try it.

Nice to meteor!

Steve took us through a kind of simplified introductory game incorporating three flights. The first time I got this I heard a number of complaints about the cards, how random their introduction was and how random their effects were. But as much as this is close to the truth, many of the naysayers missed one important facet - the game is all about working around the hazards induced by these cards. It's not as easy as simply knowing what is on them because there is still a fair degree of randomisation; in all this is definitely a risk-management game, but it is a pretty fun one. Neil liked it so much he vowed to get a copy; but let's face it - Neil buys a lot of games (almost as many as me), so it doesn't take much for him to buckle under. Still, I have to agree that a game like this is a lot of fun.

Always time for an old classic inbetween introductions.

Another game I was introduced to by Steve and Howard was In the Year of the Dragon. This strange game following one year in Medieval China is an interesting blend of programmed events and action selection. I didn't do too well at it, I have to say; but it seemed slightly more interesting than I was led to believe when I passed on it at Essen last year. Players must build palaces to house various people who fulfil different roles; these people have various uses, gaining rice, money, knowledge, military strength and buildings being among them. Ultimately combinations of these roles and a rather neat action selection system produce victory points and/or other effects based on what the event for the current month is. Only I could make this game sound this bad; well maybe not just me, because the whole reason I passed this up at Essen was based on the experiences of somebody else in the same hotel during their first game. I still don't get the urge to buy it; perhaps I just feel I have played enough games of that type, perhaps there are others immediately related to it I prefer, perhaps I just have too many games anyway or perhaps it's acombination of all three of these reasons that keeps me from buying a copy. Yet, I have this incomprehensible desire to finish off my Alea collection; so who knows what might be on the next order?

Wrong roof again - almost lost me the game.

Saturday evening was rounded off early Sunday morning with a game of Union Pacific. This was one of a couple of Alan Moon classics I managed to play at Baycon, most memorable of the others was Capitol. The trouble with a lot of these Moon titles (well I know of a few anyway) is there are usually two or three different versions of the rules; as with Time Pirates UP editions bear one of a set of German rules (as in this case, with a rather inaccurate translation), a set of official English rules from Rio Grande (usually with slight differences from the original German ruleset) or the rules the designer altered or intended (which was probably why the English translation didn't tally in this case). After some explanations and heated discussion (yours truly providing the heat), we settled on how the game was going to be played and got on with it. A good thing we did, as it was the longest game of UP ever recorded - lengthened unceremoniously by a full hour when the clocks went from GMT to BST midway through the game.

Missed out on this - shame.

Once again there were several designs being tested; JKLM Games were trying out a few of their new ones including Surprised Stare Games' upcoming Confucius which looks very interesting indeed and has been on my want list since I heard about it. Martin Wallace revealed his plans for a new range of games, and along with his other projects some of them were being playtested over the weekend. I espied Tinners' Trail - a game about Cornish tin mining, another political and military conflict (unfortunately the details escape me) and the game of Automobile (I assume a working title, but I don't know). The latter game I got to try out on Sunday morning before the presentations.

Automobile is the result of Mr Wallace's extensive historical research into the American automotive industry. He said he chose this industry in particular because unlike the early European automotive industry all the elements of free enterprise were present; direct competition, diverse markets, mass-production and significant development. The prototype below sadly has the appearance of an old-fashioned roll-and-move game; I can assure you the gameplay is very different. Each player chooses to invest in plants producing one vehicle model. The player must decide whether to risk working at a loss, pay more for better technology or just take whatever is most easily available. This is the function of the track; the further around a model is the more it costs to set up a plant and the more advanced the model is. Older models will incur losses, which are received at turn end in the form of black cubes and, if not reduced, will cost heavily at game end.

Don't ask me what's going on here; I haven't a clue.

In the centre of the board are two areas; the market area and the sales area. The market area is a map of the United States divided into five regions, each with its own demand based loosely on historical demand for the three vehicle classes. Players place their own distributors in these regions with the intention of shifting vehicles beyond what is demanded from the general sales by occupying the demand spaces at the appropriate time. The vehicle classes range from high-priced through mid-priced to low-priced vehicles, and the general demand for each is determined through the drawing of numbered tiles. Based on what players perceive this demand to be, each produces as many cars as they like within upper and lower limits for their plants. These are then distributed on the sales charts; if a player goes for a higher price he is usually less likely to shift them whereas a lower price will earn less per vehicle but results usually in more sales.

Martin has finely balanced this game, but I am sure there will be a few tweaks before long. Once again I can't wait to see these latest designs on the shelves; for some reason Martin's designs fit with my tastes almost impeccably.

Nothing to see here, move along!

The highlight of the convention had to be during the presentations. No, I'm not gloating because Mike Oakes was one point away from a guaranteed third win of the Spirit of the Game trophy; nor do I think watching everybody who gave me a sound thrashing waltz up to collect a prize and a handshake was more appealing than playing the games themselves. The highlight was prolific games designer Reiner Knizia proving once again to us ignorant British that Germans do in fact possess a sense of humour. Reiner joked about the French president visiting his home town of Windsor, the sole winner of a Nintendo DS game competition and made a few presentations. More importantly he jokingly had a dig at the choice of hotel for the convention once again; particularly the choice of breakfasts (or rather lack of it). I personally think we could do better for a hotel for Baycon, I don't think the hotel is very cheap considering what we get and to me it just seems to have a poor atmosphere - improved in no small measure through the efforts of the committee, I must hasten to add.

We were all really happy with the comedian the committee had booked.

But whether we're in the same place next year or not I look forward to attending the UK's premier games convention once again. I appreciate the work the commitee puts into this event every year, so I'd like to thank them here and now for their efforts once again (one minor point - where are those results?). All that remains is for me to congratulate James Faulkner on his winning the Victor Ludorum, and the young lady whose name I couldn't remember for winning the Roger Heyworth Spirit of the Game Award. I hope to actually play against her next year, something I unfortunately missed out on this year; and James, if you're reading this, it takes more than a win at Galaxy Trucker, you know!

Prisoner's Dilemma?

2008-02-15T10:01:00.001Z

The New Year brought in an opportunity to play one of the lesser-known Essen 2007 titles I managed to obtain. Described roughly (and with reservations) by its designer as a cross between Beowulf and Puerto Rico, there were two main selling points for me here - theme and limited print run. The former point was the most attractive, but having something relatively unique is always another; so San Quentin Kings, in all its self-published glory, made it into my swag bag.

Until January we had never really had the opportunity to play the game; when we did there were just three of us present - so you must bear this in mind as we progress. The components are pretty much as can be expected from a self-published first edition, reflecting in some measure the inexperience and limited budget which is expected when a designer takes it upon himself to sell his product to the world. If this is ever taken up by a major publisher the few problems I had with the components will be ironed out; in fairness they never really interfered with our gameplay and simply affected the aesthetics.

The game itself involves between three and five gangs competing for dominance in San Quentin prison. In order to achieve this they need to earn a good (bad?) reputation through supplying drugs, winning fights, increasing the size of their gang, sending gang members to the gym, bribing guards, procuring contraband, going into solitary confinement and dominating the riot which ends the game. Since most of these involve some sort of fighting, winning fights with other gangs is perhaps the most important means of achieving victory. But to win fights you need gang members.

There are three levels of gang members - spider, scorpion and snake - each of which has a best use in certain areas. For instance, scorpion gang members excel at improvising weapons (shanks) while spiders are quite adept at scrounging and smuggling in contraband. The snakes tend to be the muscle of the gang members, and dominate just about everything else.

During each player's turn an action is chosen. This action is then performed by all players in order. Often there will be some sort of conflict attached to the action, with the dominant fighter gaining the lion's share and non-participants gaining nothing. Once an action has been concluded, it is no longer available for the rest of that turn (a year in game terms); at the start of a new year, all actions are reset and the process begins again.

Trade has finished in the canteen; but this was no fishmarket!

Fighting is perhaps the game's core mechanism. Players who wish to fight pick a number of their gang members as a secret bid. Once this is laid on the table players take turns to draw fight cards, or if they have any at their disposal play shank cards, in order to bolster their existing strength. Then depending on the action and the gang members involved (a different hierarchy for each action) a winner, second-place and third-place gang are determined. These will each gain some benefit according to the action.

When the last year has been played, there is one big fight - the riot - which is an opportunity to garner a few more points before the final scoring. Final scoring is based mainly on any drugs obtained, dominance in each type of gang member, and who won the most fights throughout the game. Naturally, the highest score wins.

I won this first game but not by much; usually a close finish is the sign of a good game and in this case the theory has been bolstered. With Ian, Hatti and me playing I can confirm it does actually work with three players; I have yet to play it with the full complement of five. I think competition will be a little bit tougher in that case and I look forward to it. The game is a lot of fun to play and perhaps fills that niche between the Euro and Ameritrash genres; the action function is clearly of a Euro style, but the whole theme and presentation (with perhaps the exception of the wooden components - much more practical for a secret bid than minis) is very much Ameritrash. If you prefer a hybrid design (as I do) then this is the way to go; let's hope a major publisher takes up SQK soon, so that more can experience it.

US Advance Stalled

2008-02-14T19:48:00.000Z

A week ago, Tom came around for a wargame session. A few weeks back we had managed to get in some Combat Commander: Europe, and I do have quite a few others I want to try, but I just couldn't resist giving Tide of Iron another bash having missed out on playing it since last Summer.

I decided I didn't want the game to last too long; we're still both getting used to the system because it's not the kind of game the group manages to play too often. Hence I chose a scenario with limited turns, The Last Stand, as downloadable from the FFG website. The scenario involves a US advance on a German position; as you probably guessed from the title the US advance ended up less than successful.

Taking command of the German force, I decided a building overlooking the road down which the enemy was likely to advance would make a good vantage point for an MG42 team accompanied by an AT squad. This deployment was my first and perhaps my greatest mistake of the entire game; Tom as US commander rolled forward one of his Sherman tanks and rendered the building a deathtrap. His first shot took out the MG42 leaving the best part of the road clear for his advance.

My second mistake of the game was to leave the surviving Panzerschrek team in that building, awaiting an expected advance from one of the enemy tanks - it didn't happen and they soon suffered the same fate as the machine-gunners. This was a devastating loss for the German side.

However the US commander failed to exploit this initial advantage; I suppose the less than effective MG42 I had positioned a little further back from the bridge provided some discouragement to his troops breaking cover, and perhaps the lurking Panzer IV I had covering the crest of the hill had something to do with it. The result was that for most of the game the US commander garnered few command points, while I managed to reinforce my dwindling forces fairly regularly. This ensured a rather slow advance for his infantry, to the point that by the mid-game it had become all but impossible for Tom to meet his objectives

The beginning of the end - a German PzIV shakes up a Sherman.
A short time later, though, Tom pressed his advance across the bridge on my left flank; simultaneously he attempted to race a Sherman around the hill despite the realisation he could not succeed - his intention it seemed was simply to inflict maximum casualties before the game was over. My only effective means of stopping his tank was my Panzer as he had successfully eliminated my AT elements; outflanking his Sherman I first damaged then destroyed it. But the Panzer suffered damage first and it only took a swift coup-de-grace from his second tank to burn it out.
While all this was going on, his troops pushed up and took the bridge, were disrupted by my rearguard MG42 as they crossed it, and then wiped out in a counter-attack by my reserves. At this point it dawned on Tom he had overlooked the value of an assault order altogether; having already failed to meet his objective he decided it would be a good time to try. He drew up an assault on my fresh troops in the open between the bridge and a nearby building, but failed to eliminate them totally. Soon after the turn limit was reached.
This is a good game and really needs to be played more; I recently acquired the Days of the Fox expansion and look forward to trying out some North African scenarios in the near future. However this scenario seems very difficult for the American forces to win; I would advise using this scenario where there is an imbalance between players - perhaps where one player is new to the game and the other not - giving the more experienced player the American forces.

Contain Yourself!

2008-02-14T11:08:00.001Z

Tuesday's session saw my second game of Container; yes I know I was a bit lax and didn't write anything about last time, but for me times are changing and besides I had to try it twice before I could say for certain how I feel about the game. I have since found we may have been playing a rule wrong - or rather overlooking a rule - regarding a player's turn ending once an auction takes place; but I doubt it's omission really has any bearing on what I am about to say on the game.

My produce, my goods ready to ship, not a ship in sight.

Container is one of those games which is purely economics. It's a combination of limited funds and limited actions, the product of these factors being a game in which all of the players directly influence a market in which they themselves are both the sellers and the buyers. The whole market can be simpified into the following short list:

1. Goods are produced at a fixed cost of 1 (disregarding factory costs for the time being as the first machine is free).

2. The price of produced goods is set by the player producing; between 1 and 4.

3. Goods can then be bought by other players, who then set a new price for them at between 2 and 6.

4. Goods may be loaded onto ships at the given cost, but not from one's own harbour.

5. Goods are transported to the island and sold by the shipload to the highest bidder in a blind-bid auction; if the highest bidder happens to be the ship's owner they pay to the bank, otherwise they receive both the bid and the same amount again from the bank.

6. Goods on the island will vary in value from 2 to 10 at game end; this value is different for each player. One good will be worth double (10 instead of 5) as long as at least one of every type is present Additionally, whichever good they have shipped more than any other to the island will become instantly worthless at game end.

That's about it; as you can probably tell it's quite easy to gauge what anything is worth to you but very difficult to gauge its worth to any other single player. This is, however, a minor problem when the game is considered as a whole - there are other, much worse issues I have with the game as a whole.

The island stock is rising, but not where I'm shipping it isn't!

Auctions, which occur when a ship arrives at the foreign island, are the only way money is brought into this semi-closed economy - as well as being a key means of the total money in circulation being reduced. Even though payments are made between players (as they are during all other trades during the game), an equivalent amount is also taken from the bank - unless the shipping player decides he wants the goods for himself (in which case money is taken out of circulation by that player, whose final bid goes into the bank). As I said above, these auctions follow a blind bid format; players secretly select their bid amount and simultaneously reveal their bid. This can too easily result in overbidding and essentially induces severe chaos to the system; this chaos is one of the key factors which makes the in-game value of a container of any sort difficult to pin down. The direct effect of this, for the seller at least, is it then becomes difficult to sift through the minutiae to evaluate the highest bid in comparison to the worth of that shipment. The indirect effect is tied in with the next major issue I have - competitive pricing groupthink.

The way containers are priced, either in factory storage or in the harbour, ought to have some basis in what players expect to sell them for if they were to ship them to the island. However in the games I have played this is usually ignored in favour of direct competition between the players. Yes, it's a groupthink effect and with a bit of experience I expect the way pricing behaves in the in-game market will change; as it stands however the player to the direct left of the player selling at knockdown prices is basically given first refusal on a gift - assuming he has the warehouse space. If not enough players do, then what usually happens is everybody starts dropping their prices; but as I say it usually goes the other way with one player reaping the benefits and the others just watching their cashflow fritter away in comparison. This is probably less effective where there are fewer players, but with the full complement of five players I have to say it becomes rather annoying if one player is simply feeding the next cheap product in a constant flow.

And therein is the final problem I have to discuss with a game like this - it has a fixed turn order. There may be a way to manipulate this to best personal effect, but I haven't seen one. If player A plays poorly then player B, not players C, D or E, will benefit. I can see the blind auction works much better in this situation, but as far as the rest of the game goes a player is forced to adapt their strategy based on his place in the seating order. Still, that could be argued as being a minor failing or even a feature in some respects.

In summary, while there are some interesting economic facets to this game - enough to keep me playing for the time being - making the right play is kind of a hit-and-miss affair. As the game unfolds you can get an idea of the demand, but by then it's too late to turn back on the semi-random errors you made early on. You will have been producing for most of the game and buying other's stock to ship; but right up until the last few turns you will probably be unaware of exactly who wants what containers. I suppose you could figure it out, but that's a lot of work to put in for less reward than it ought to be. This is a game which seems to hold some water with the rest of the group, so for now I'll continue playing (at least until I get the special containers I was promised by Valley Games); if I'm missing something feel free to comment; if I'm not then please feel free to elaborate.

2007 - The Agony and the Ecstasy

2008-02-04T16:48:00.000Z

Originally I intended this article to appear around the beginning of January, but with my job disappearing I have been concentrating on other matters. I missed out on writing about a lot of things last year; that could mean I got in more gaming but really the only certainty is I got in less writing. Looking back, there were highlights and lowlights I ought to have discussed but never. There were also enough episodes I did discuss that I could still talk a little more about:

The Agony

Fury of Dracula (GW)

After much waiting, when we finally got around to playing the old version of Fury of Dracula I found myself very disappointed. There just isn't enough cunning required on either side. Dracula can too easily avoid the hunters when they are strong, yet the hunters can too easily find Dracula on the turn of a card.

Furthermore, the core hunting mechanisms have very little bearing on the outcome; this relies on a combination of good draws and good rolls for one party or the other. IMO the whole hunting element which forms the core of the game should influence the outcome more.
Think about it; a hunter with any sense would only choose to hunt during daylight and must spend the night fending off Dracula and his minions. Likewise, why would Dracula attack during the day? He would choose the cover of darkness when he is at his most powerful.
Alright, maybe I'm a little bitter at rolling daylight for the one and only encounter I had as Dracula in a game lasting the evening; and hence automatically losing against a hunter with a stake.

I've never played the new game so I don't know if things have improved; but this minor element tarnished an otherwise fun game. If there is a little more strategy involved (as in trying to time encounters so they occur to your side's advantage) then it would work better for me personally.

Age of Empires III

Ekted's report on this kind of inspired this whole article; no matter how many times I play it I seem to end up completely missing the point. The game sits there and grins at you, telling you there is no required strategy, yet colonisation seems to be the way to go (colonies being the only points to score more than once). But as soon as you head down one road, the unknown order of discoveries and capital buildings plays havoc, and the initial leader finds himself trailing. The swing introduced by discoveries is just too great.

In subsequent games I have tried to take different approaches, even took greater chances on discoveries, but they never seem to work. Mike, however, seems to be doing comparatively well every time he plays - how can this be? We're talking about the D.O.G. here; he never does well!

But the frustration here is a little nicer than that over Fury; it makes me determined to have another go just to prove I'm wrong. If I can't prove I'm wrong soon, however, it could be the trade-pile for this one.

A Game of Thrones: A Storm of Swords Expansion

The latest expansion to a most excellent boardgame can also be played as a separate four-player game based around the central part of Westeros. However many of the enclosed additions are for the base game and it is these which brought great agony earlier this year.

The new rules lengthened player turns considerably; I suppose practice would reduce downtime but day-long sessions are getting increasingly difficult to set up around here. We used leaders, the special Westeros deck for this edition, special one-time orders, ports from the first expansion and the new cards for each house. I may have left something out as it was some time ago now; what I can remember is the hideous results.

The game lasted way beyond the alloted three hours - in fact it was around eight hours (and was unfinished - we had to stop after turn nine because people were running out of time). This was blamed primarily on the new Westeros deck, which allowed far too much mustering and not enough of the Wildling attacks. Combined with a little AP this just made the game drag. Oh, the agony!

The Circle

Never before has a game promised so much and delivered so little. Alright, a fair bit of exaggeration there; however having bought this at my first ever Essen due to its excellent theme and what appeared to be one of the most innovative mechanisms of the year (the time wheel) i was severely disappointed to find a heavily AP-prone, slow-moving strategy. Neither theme nor mechanism has managed to save this one from only going a single play; as wont as I am to give games a chance this one is teetering on the cliff-edge overlooking my trade pile.

1825 Unit 1

I'm not really blaming the game here, though it is partially down to the game. We played Southern England only, with four of us. This is generally bad (as I was to find out the hard way) because there are too few companies to go around and it's highly likely one player is going to be mostly watching everybody else doing something - at least for most of the game. In this particular case it was Neil, known to be a rather tolerant gamer who likes games from all genres. His tolerance was tested to the limit here, as he spent around two hours doing next to nothing (having figured out that buying or selling shares wouldn't help him at this point). He said he was considering never playing a game of that genre again after that session, and I couldn't fault his statement. I just hope he doesn't stand by it indefinitely.

This was the last of several plays with just one unit; it highlighted the main problem with this game more than it had before. The player who floats the first company is highly likely to walk away with it. Introducing extra units and expansions to this one for four players or more is probably going to be key in varying the outcome, but until I can get in another session that remains to be seen.

The Ecstasy

Tide of Iron

Never in the field of conflict has so much been spent on so little by so many. But I just had to have it, I just had to try it and I just had a great time. ASL'ers will tell you their favourite tactical level wargame is the best because of the detail it delivers, miniatures wargamers will tell you that nothing can beat the feel of the open-form battlefield with painted scenery, soldiers and scaled measurement; I would take ToI over both of them any day. The main reason is because it occupies the middle ground between the two so well; it straddles the almost opposing ideals of realism and elegance quite satisfactorily. I don't wish to get into arguments about realism, but I've always thought any system which goes deep into the realms of simulation goes too far; thankfully ToI doesn't and I look forward to the upcoming expansion Days of the Fox (which arrived in the post today!).

Twilight Imperium 3

Playing with the expansion for the first time earlier this year was a very satisfying experience indeed. the game actually felt it had purpose to it, more than the basic game at least, and I really enjoyed being trounced having reached a dominant position which I held for around three quarters of the game. There's a hell of a lot of atmosphere to this game, and with the introduction of several changes from the expansion it felt more like a galactic struggle than a competition for the most ISC selections. The only downside is still the massive playing time; there were only four of us this time around and yet the game still seemed to threaten a duration into the small hours of Sunday morning, after a mid-afternoon start.

Warrior Knights

We managed to get this game to the table a couple of times this year, but I'm particularly referring to the Crown and Glory expansion. It added several interesting aspects to this game of politics and war; we tried everything but the rules for the King (I'm looking forward to going through those later this year). If you ever play this game, be careful of the player who lays siege to three or four cities on that first turn. It's highly likely if he isn't disturbed he'll have a great advantage for the rest of the game.

Cuba

Despite many who said this game was made of much the same stuff oher predecessors were, we found it a really enjoyable and challenging strategy game - not to mention worth looking at! My first approach at a strategy was a water strategy, but then one of the others fouled that up by building the golf course. A change in strategy at this point fared no better; thankfully a game like this rewards a flexible approach. That flexibility still wasn't enough to get me a victory; Chris had the Town Hall in his pocket and dominated the politics.

Age of Steam: Chesapeake & Ohio

An unofficial expansion, downloadable for free, this proved to be a very good map indeed. The rules involved found great favour amongst our rail gamers and as I recall the results were fairly close. Cut-throat games like AoS can really shine when the right map appears; C&O is an excellent, free addition to the myriad of expansions available.

Brass

Up for my 2007 game of the year this one is; but as you know I have gotten kind of lax on these matters. Brass seems to have taken the networking elements of Wallace's rail games and introduced an industrial framework for them - fitting perfectly the theme of Lancashire during the Industrial Revolution. The networking element is the core, starting with the canal era and then moving into the rail era. I can see a lot of plays in the future for this one; it's my kind of game.

Railroad Tycoon: Europe Map

I'm still waiting for the official Rails of Europe to surface, but way back in the Spring we got to play Chris Boote's excellent conversion of the base game into a European map. To me this was much better than the base game; all of the map space was used, the special rules made it more balanced in addition to the even distribution of cities, and most of all the cards had less of an influence on the outcome. Chris did an excellent job; unfortunately I have yet to try other conversions, but at least I have a decent benchmark.

That is 2007 in the can; now I have to look forward to 2008. I'm living in hope of a more regular foray into the world of the light-to-medium wargame, the more adventurous boardgames and perhaps a slight return to the role-playing hobby (that all depends on whether or not Hatti will volunteer as Dungeon Master!).

Christmas Gaming

2007-12-31T06:31:00.000Z

In an unusual turn of events I had the rare pleasure this year of actually spending some time on both Christmas Night and Boxing Night at my Mother's house. On both occasions I took along some games and on Boxing Night I actually got to rope in a couple of siblings to play.

We started with that poster child for the gateway game, Carcassonne. I decided the basic game would be enough and so I taught my brother, Rob and my sister, Kate how to play. After I gave them a sound defeat for their first game we went on to play it again; this time Rob took a graceful victory by lapping both of us on the scoreboard before we even considered farmers.

At this point I decided it was time to move on to something else; the game I chose was O Zoo Le Mio, a fairly simple auction and building game. Both enjoyed it immensely; it even garnered some attention from my young nephew Brian, but I decided to explain it all and involve him directly would be too much (for me). Instead I allowed him to look after the bank, the benches and the customer meeples. Kate ran away with this one, and as is usual under Simons' law I came in last place with an appalling score.

To round it all off, I brought out the Perudo set and taught them Liar Dice in the gradual way I prefer. That meant our first game was straight rolls and bluffing with no special calls and no rerolls. Again it was welcomed, but after a couple of games we had to call it a day (or rather night, as it was approaching the witching hour) so I never got as far as introducing anything beyond the basics.

This was an unexpected delight, getting to play games with my family over the holidays. I wonder if I would be able to encourage them to play Age of Steam next year?

A Thoughtful Present

2007-12-29T21:02:00.000Z

I said to my Mother the same thing I said to all of my relatives when they asked me what I would like for Christmas.

"Don't even try to get me a game of any description; I already have most of the games you could buy and most of the games I want you wouldn't be able to find."

So I asked the Missus for an electric razor (I'm getting lazier as I age), my eldest lad for a DVD "or something" (24 season two was what I got) and for a wallet off anybody who would get me one (as mine is worn out from being opened so often from buying games - I mean Christmas presents). I was expecting the usual socks, underwear and/or smellies from Mother, so I left that as it was.

You can imagine my surprise when, on Christmas Eve, my Mother pointed to a large present under her tree and said, "That one's yours, you've got the biggest one this time."

"Biggest isn't always best," I retorted, following glibly with "except in my case perhaps - I am the biggest in this room". My Mother's reply left me intrigued.

"Well I think you'll like it a lot, but Pamela won't." What could she mean? Only moments earlier when I had been doing the usual cryptic fishing (just enough so I would never know for certain what was in there) she had hinted that the present was "no use for your feet but might be for your head". Well if it wasn't for Mother I probably wouldn't have gotten into all this gaming lark anyway; she still poses these little riddles at Christmas and I still enjoy them.

Come Christmas morning we had to decide who was going to be Santa. It is usually me, being the Father in our household, but this year I said Darren, my youngest, could do it because he had to practice for when he would have kids to entertain (and besides I had already decided this would be a lazy Christmas for me). Of course, his lack of experience at playing Santa meant he went straight for the gift that was biggest - which happened to be mine.

"I don't have any idea what she's got me this year," I said, as I held the package and tore off the end. It was about the size of an FFG box, but lopsided in shape being higher at one end than the other. "I think it's probably going to be a hat and scarf and some toiletries," I said, remembering the riddle Mother had posed. As the wrapping tore away, I gasped in astonishment (genunine pictures of me doing this later - my Son's girlfriend has them on her camera).

There on my lap was a copy of Dark Tower, a game I had owned around a quarter-century ago but had since passed the way of other old toys. What made it more special was that my Mother had gone to such trouble to get it. It was a copy from the United States (you could instantly tell by the different packaging - and the fact USPS tape held all the bubble-wrap together), she had placed a chancing bid on Ebay (I don't know how much and never asked) and apparently got it cheaper than the norm because of a few missing pieces (a gold key, the corner pieces for the board and a few red pegs - not exactly game-breakers).

All set for adventure! The tower was fully working so that was a bonus!

Yes, I know there isn't a lot of game to it (I've since played it for the first time in twenty-odd years), but this was such a thoughtful present I was absolutely chuffed to bits. I mean, you know how difficult it is to get hold of a copy, don't you? I must've been a good boy all year to get this. Thanks Mum!

Where there's Muck...

2007-12-20T07:12:00.000Z

My first experience of Brass was at Baycon earlier this year. The version I played recently was different to the prototype but only slightly; this was my first attempt at the released version. Brass seems to take the networking concept of Age of Steam (or at least Volldampf, Wallace's other successful rail game) to the extra level of industry. Players each build their own part of the infrastructure and use it to transport materials they mine, smelt or manufacture. Naturally this brings in income and the ubiquitous victory points.

The most striking aspect of Brass is its elegance. Everything has been boiled down to the most basic representation, keeping the game flowing and the complexities at bay. An example of this would be the way that coal and iron are dealt with; rather than having to work out operating costs, negotiate a price and sell at a loss until a point is reached where the capital cost of setting up the coalmine or ironworks has been offset (after which everything is a profit) we simply place a number of coal or iron resources on the plant and no income is gained until they are used up. It's simple, it's effective and there is absolutely nothing for the industrial entrepreneur to work out above and beyond which is the best strategy for them to approach. As a whole, Wallace's model of a rising industrial North-West of England makes for a good approximation of the history, something he has become particularly adept at over the past decade or so.

Another example of clever and functional simplification in this game is the approach to technology. The development action allows players to improve the ways in which cotton is spun, iron is smelted and coal is mined simply by removing the less efficient low-tech tiles from the top of their stacks to reveal (and hence make available for building) the more lucrative examples of their industry. The availability of these technologies is also loosely governed by the current phase of the game. The whole game is divided into two eras; first the canal age comes along during which certain newer technologies are limited then the rail age comes along during which certain older technologies become obsolete.

Throughout all of this each player must try to measure their most beneficial means of generating extra income whilst simultaneously aiming for a higher score. Like most games of this type (resource-based building and network management) you can't do one without first doing the other; thus more cash allows a player to generate more cash and more points. Naturally there are choices to be made; a shipyard for example will not generate as much income as it will points, selling cotton to distant markets carries risk or reward and venturing into coal before the rail age arrives is all a matter of timing if one wishes to make the best of it.

Brass is a very clever design in danger of superceding Age of Steam as my favourite Warfrog title; but in all fairness I have to give it time before I can make such ambitious claims. Certainly it has shone out as the best of my Essen haul so far; it beats the nearest contender, Cuba, by a significant margin. But like every game it has its downsides; the biggest (and this is really the best I can come up with) is the restriction to four players. Second, the rules are a little unorthodox - the organisation into a main body and reference section didn't work well for me with Catan and doesn't here. even though difficult questions can be easily answered by a well-indexed reference section, finding the right rule in the first place would have been better. Like I said, my complaints are of minimal significance.

Air Baron

2007-12-13T16:58:00.000Z

Despite more new games to try out than you can shake a stick at, it always feels good to get something older off the shelf and have a go. This is especially true if you have just managed to get hold of your first ever copy and need a refresher for an upcoming session. Such was the case for Mike last week, when he got out his recently acquired copy of Air Baron in preparation for a session at the Wassail Games Club, Frome.

Near the beginning

Air Baron has been loosely described more than once by various sources as a wargame disguised as a business game - I may even be guilty myself, I can't remember. The object is to be the first to reach a specific level of wealth consisting of both market share and cash-in-hand. In order to achieve this, the players first need to dominate the spokes and hubs of the airways of the USA then subsequently push out their opponents to increase their own market share, income and hence wealth towards the target.

Essentially it is a really fun game of business conflict, with the location of player airline operations being key to the outcome of the entire game. Different approaches can be made towards the goal; a player could concentrate defensively and rest on his laurels simply waiting for the cash to pile up, or he can invest in valuable foreign spokes for the chance of high income, or he can go into fare wars adopting an aggressive takeover strategy with a mind to becoming the key airline nationwide, or he could just spread himself about a bit with investment in different regions for dominance rather than control - the list is long but not endless.

Jet Stream deploys Jumbos under threat.

In every other game we have played only the basic rules had been used, so despite the presence of one or two Air Baron virgins we agreed to give the advanced game a try. This meant loans could be taken out, one of a number of events could occur, and extra sources of income such as the government contract were introduced. One would think the effect would be a game-lengthening one; in fact the advanced game probably does as much to shorten the game as it does to lengthen it; the time saved reaching the target with these extra income sources more than offsets the time lost dealing with negative events.

That said, there were still a couple of players (primarily the virgins, I think) who found the central mechanism just a little too random for their tastes. For three rounds solid not a single dollar in income was gained by either Nick or Ricco, a direct effect of a combination of low player order in the first turn and the ever-increasing number of tokens added to the pool with every player's turn. When you add in the fact that one or two of the leading players would get lucky and receive a grand payout every turn or two it almost seemed like another case of the rich getting richer. The trouble is there is no easy solution; a fixed income would surely guarantee the rich get richer, whereas keeping it random can't guarantee the trailers gain anything at all. It's probably best to keep things as they are, or perhaps give all players a bit more starting capital than they get. If I ever get to try out any of these I'll let you know.

I now have the urge to play this game again very soon; it's odd that I seem to get this urge mainly with the older games despite having played many very good (or at least potentially good) games that are newer than this one. If you can get in a game I recommend it.

Thrower's Law

2007-12-12T22:36:00.000Z

An interesting article by Matt Thrower has appeared on Fortress: Ameritrash. I thought I better let you know, because it's likely many of you reading this think there's nothing over there but hot air.

Matt attributes his findings to the alleged habit of Chess great Bobby Fischer deliberately laying smokescreens during play; I think his interpretation of what this means in gaming in general has little to do with Fischer. It is a very interesting article which opens up discussion on some very good points and though I don't necessarily agree with everything Matt puts forward it is a good read.

Oranges and Lemons

2007-12-12T20:40:00.000Z

At Hatti's last session the game was Hamburgum - or rather Londinium I suppose because we played the English side of the board. This was my first try of this game and naturally familiarity of Mac Gerdts's previous output helped with the function of the now-famous rondel mechanism.

The most attractive aspect of the rondel, generally speaking, is its control over the flow of the game. It breaks up everybody's turns neatly into interleaved actions whilst simultaneously controlling the meter of the game's built-in clock. After playing this latest game the rondel now feels it has reached fruition; the cost of further movement is at its best balance in Hamburgum in comparison to the other two games using one. Furthermore there seems to be greater reason to pay for those extra spaces on the rondel during your turn simply because of the nature of timing throughout the game.

As the game moves forward with vigour, my options quickly slim.

Yet I find myself rather disappointed with this game; the reason has less to do with the core mechanism and more to do with the rest of it. Players mainly earn points through building churches and collecting scoring tiles; however it feels to me that once one player has a good scoring tile there is nothing you can do about it and he can be difficult to catch. There is competition for the various buildings and even for contributing to the different levels of the churches but there is absolutely nothing one can do to slow down a lead because once he has it you cannot take it away. This means it can be very difficult to catch up if you're trailing and only a collective effort from all players can bring the leader to an abrupt halt. This is the failing of many multiplayer games, on two counts no less. First they allow one player to gain a significant lead then they make it very difficultto let anybody else challenge it.

Naturally, you must take everything I'm saying as the synopsis of a single play because that is exactly what it is; I can't honestly say I haven't missed anything. That said, the game still seems a little bit bland and while playing it seemed I had no real options; I mean there are options but it is almost crystal clear which you should or should not take. The flow of the game seems to make most decisions for you, and you are left with the ability only to react to what everybody else is doing. Transparency notwithstanding, the best strategies will usually escape me on the first play hence I will desire another go at it just to see if I'm right.

The bells made me deaf, you know.

As a footnote, I must point out that we did allow the winner to break a little rule just once; due to our own oversight he managed to build two official's buildings in one turn. Had we changed this he wold probably have still built it anyway on a subsequent turn and still enhanced his lead; I think in all he was an outright winner. Let's hope the game is a winner too; I'll let you know next time.

Extended Pillars

2007-11-22T10:10:00.000Z

I said "pillars", not "pillows"!

Heavy gaming at conventions over the weekend is likely to take its toll by the middle of the week; even the usually active Mike starts to feel it after over one hundred years of gaming (we used the mirror just to make sure he was sleeping). With this in mind I decided I would bring along something with which he was familiar to his hosted session. In this case it was Pillars of the Earth. Naturally I want to get as many of my latest acquisitions played, so in addition (and out of necessity) I took along the five to six player expansion for Pillars.

The basic game of Pillars of the Earth has been criticised for being too pedestrian, too much like other resource-based games and described as "Caylus lite". I don't know about you, but it really irritates me when games are described this way; it gives you expectations, good or bad, and often the game doesn't live up to them. Sure, I can see the similarities (worker assignment, resource gathering and spending resources in exchange for points) and can even accept to a certain extent how much easier it is to describe a game by comparison. But when you play Pillars of the Earth comparisons to Caylus will mislead you.

For the basic game there were often complaints about how random the master builder draw was and how unrewarding the game felt because that might arbitrarily decide for you whether you get to use the action that will decide the outcome of the game for you. With the expansion this has been alleviated slightly through the use of the master builder track. This track leads to the compulsory last place choice for the player fortunate enough to place the first master builder. The reason for its introduction is not quite clear to me insofar as whether it was meant to be used for less players than five or just for games in which the numbers are escalated beyond this point; indeed I have to confess to not being aware if the expansion is intended for use with less than five at all.

The master builder track is on the extension board which is part of the expansion; in addition there are several other areas to visit as part of the turn process. There is the tax collector, on which one master builder can earn one player the taxed amount as opposed to paying it. There are four slots for players to send workers to the Crusades for points. A pilgrimage to France across the Channel brings inspiration for one master builder, allowing him to use another player's craftsman. The coast allows you to sell resources abroad for a slightly higher price. Shiring has been under development and new houses bring with them the opportunity to take a third advantage card. Finally the metal resources, rather than being stored off-board, have a place to go in the form of the King's Mine.

I lost because of that tablecloth.

Naturally, the cards available for four or less players just aren't enough so there are extra craftsmen, resource and advantage cards made available throughout the game. We played with five players and I cannot help but wonder if the game will be better or worse with six as a result of this new mix. I suspect it will play better, because the expansion will have been designed primarily with six in mind.

For three of the other players this was their first time playing the game in any form; they seemed to enjoy it and I was naturally left in last place at the end of the game. All of the newcomers commented on the similarities between this and Caylus, with the obvious implication that it was a lot more manageable and less prone to screwage. but you really want to know more about how suitable the expansion is and whether it's worth getting.

The answer in short is if you're happy with four-player Pillars then don't bother, but if like me you are often engaged in games with groups numbering more than four it is a necessity. The long answer is a little more complex; the expansion provides very little extra to the game above and beyond the necessary. There are new places to visit which are nothing special as such; the Crusades give you something else to do with those spare workers you couldn't employ elsewhere; the Tax Collector is just a variation on the King's camp, the coast is an exclusive sale-only market which, for five at least, meant the original market was barely used; an extension to Shiring and the King's mine was unnecessary. France, while providing an interesting twist with it's Inspiration of St Denis, is little else than another place to go. This is all good, don't get me wrong; it's been done in a fairly straightforward fashion, so you simply mustn't expect something mindblowing or you'll get an "is that it?" feeling.

I'm certain there is value to introducing the master builder track; more plays may teach me otherwise but I think perhaps the existing track could have been altered for better effect. Now the value to paying at the higher end is less clear (in a good way); pay the maximum of seven and you'll gain first placement somewhere but you will also gain last placement. Finally I wonder if the random element of the draw has a greater effect on the chaos level with more players - my gut instinct tells me it does, yet the game last night went so well I wonder if it actually matters. The whole picture looked very favourable, but in my opinion you should only buy this expansion if the numbers dictate; don't just get it for the sake of owning it or having different options available for fewer numbers of players.

Darjeeling Limited?

2007-11-21T15:00:00.000Z

See what I did with the title? Clever that, isn't it - you know, in a double-meaning kind of way what with the film coming out and all. But naturally the question I am asking in a semi-rhetorical fashion is exactly that.

Last night I managed to persuade our illustrious hostess and her other guest, Neil, to try out Darjeeling, the Essen release from Abacus Spiele. Just in case you couldn't guess at the theme it is actually about picking and shipping tea (although I may have confused you with the title a little into thinking it had more to do with a train journey connected - however tenuously I don't know - with the place).

The main element of Darjeeling which attracted me was, I must confess, a bit of a gimmick. Next to the shipping wharf there is a device used to determine the demand for the different tea varieties (red, green, black and white); quite simply the furher apart the indicators are for any one colour the higher the demand. Not having played before I feel I was drawn in by this device a little; in all honesty it has a very small impact on the game (even though it can be exploited by a cunning player).

Well would you look at that - the green player ships black tea and starts to earn a fortune.

Anyway, the core points earner of the game is not so much the peripheral demand mechanism but rather the boats onto which a player loads his tea crates. Each boat has an associated multiplier; as new boats are loaded at the wharf, older boats are pushed down the line and the lowest removed. Thus, the longer you can keep a boat at the top of the line the more points that single shipment will score you. If the other players collectively fail to ship anything between your turns you are likely to develop a solid and unchallenged lead very quickly - a potential for a runaway leader.

I digress a bit, because in order to load these crates in the first place a player must first collect tiles by moving his picker around the country - represented by a board made up of crate tiles onto and over which the picker is moved in order to pick the one you want. This movement is deliberately restrictive, and anything over and above a single right-angle turn and one space forward will cost. The main restriction is that movement is always in a straight line, so to weave your way around the tiles you need to make that shipment could take several turns.

More tea, Vicar?

Which brings me back to the shipments; a player fortunate enough to take advantage of a quick succession of moves for a large shipment early in the game is likely to be unchallenged for a bit as the other players vie to put something together to slow him down. In our game last night, Neil took it upon himself to get something shipped as soon as possible to push my score down; but this was then a matter of self-sacrifice as he was essentially being forced to ship small loads early to prevent my score running away.

With all these misgivings, we enjoyed the game; but I personally felt it was all over a little too quickly. There are other factors which lead to my uncertainty too; I wonder if the game changes substantially with the number of players, for example. We were playing on what the rules describe as a two to three player board (Sri Lanka) but it just seemed there was too little competition against a clear leader. Whether this would change when scaling up to four or five payers remains to be seen but it doesn't take the brains of an archbishop to know that more opponents equals more possibility of somebody else having a score close to yours and more direct competition on the boats. Another doubt is over our groupthink last night; it may just be that none of my opponents were really on the mark - at least for the opening moves - which allowed me to take up the standard and march on. There is no greater evidence to support this than the clear violation of Simons' Law (the owner and teacher of a new game always comes in last place); if I hadn't won I wouldn't be so uncertain about it.

So for the time being Darjeeling gains praise in some respects and disappoints heavily in others; for now I am truly on the fence with this one.

All Work and No Play...

2007-11-20T08:09:00.001Z

Today, as I watch the hours fritter by, I thought I might share with you some of the games I have been playing a lot of recently during tea-breaks at work. They all share one thing in common; they're short. That's a given when you need to get a game out in under half an hour (or ten minutes, depending on the break of course). Another thing they all have in common is an instant fun-factor, whether it's an opportunity to engage in some slight ribbing or mere game-related banter. tha final thing they have in common is a certain suitability for the non-gamer.

Heckmeck am Bratwurmeck - the wafer-thin theme of stealing worms from a barbecue does little to hide this rather excitable dice game; there is so much trash-talk going on when we play this it's almost a riot. I have subsequently had to order several for my colleagues so they could take them home or give them as gifts to others.

Hick Hack in Gackelwack - from the same small-box series as Heckmeck, this more child-oriented version of Razzia had the lads clucking like chickens, which drew a bit more attention to our little group and one or two more interested parties. Again, I had to order a few; very popular.

Scream Machine - I have only recently introduced this one; it is a little closer to the "gateway" than the others so far, but I'm not really pushing anything more complicated. They seem to be enjoying it so far; this might be another one they consider a stocking-filler.

Formula Motor Racing - the "take that" aspect is always welcome in these short games (especially at work) and this neat little card game has it in buckets.

Perudo - this is still coming out now and again, using different variations at different times.

Risk Express - a relatively new addition to my collection and one of the most suitable for the breaktime session; I was astonished to find one amongst us who had never played the original game and couldn't draw parallels between the two as a result.

Bohnanza - an abortive attempt to introduce a bit more meat; the game was appreciated, don't get me wrong. However the game lasts a litle too long to be played regularly at break so I took it home.

These games have, in one way or another, replaced a load of bog-standard card games we were playing before. We were also playing a hell of a lot of Fluxx, something I didn't mind but also something which one clearly must move away from eventually to preserve one's sanity. Other games played in the interim period with some success were 6 Nimmt and Hornochsen; both related and both very good games - especially for a tea-break.

Hello World and Germany People!

2007-11-19T12:10:00.000Z

There were a few surprises for me at Essen; one of the most amusing (and at the same time interesting) was the range of games offered by Japon Brand.

"Hello World and Germany People!" The opening Engrish from the Japon Brand brochure, in a rather cute and amusing way, sums up what these guys are all about. Japon Brand have set out to introduce to the Western world their line of games, chosen from different Japanese manufacturers as games which would appeal to gamers. In at least two cases that I know of they have succeeded. Tony Brown had drawn my attention to them when he bought a copy of this game, Origin of Failingwater; I ended up buying no less than three of their titles.

The Escheresque box cover - the game flow is even more bewildering!

The rather tenuous theme is that of an architect trying to build Failingwater House, a mansion under a waterfall. Players assist him in this task by playing their cards to build the mansion from the bottom up. Then the water is allowed to flow down, which, in game terms, means the effects of the card play are interpreted from the top down.

This is essentially a trick-taking game in reverse. There are a fixed four rounds in which a different order of points cards is used. These form the basis of one's strategy; there are blue points and red points, however the points scored at the end of the round will be the difference between the two. The last trick is played first, the second-to-last trick played second and so on until the first trick which is played last. Then the results of each trick are checked. The lead player of the round determines which is the trump card by the one he played last in the first trick (you follow?). The winner of that trick becomes the lead player for the next trick, which was actually played second to last; and so on through to the first trick played which is now the last trick determined.

This probably sounds a little too indeterminate; I mean until you know who is going to win the first trick how will you be able to know which card to play first for the last trick? That, my friends, is what makes this game beautiful. You have to play each trick either with the knowledge you are going to lose/win the one after, or to make it so. You don't want to win every trick after all, just the alternating ones. Or perhaps you don't want to win any, but at the same time you don't want anybody else to gain significant points.

In addition to this quirky little trick-taking game, I obtained a copy of Master of Rules. This game had been introduced to me by a handful of Californians and I was instantly smitten by it. I would describe it as a kind of trick-taking game again, but this time the twist is everybody lays down their own rules in order for them to win the trick. As a direct result, multiple players may win the same trick.

In a nutshell, there are two decks involved in every hand; a deck of suited, numbered cards and a deck of rules. On a player's turn either one rule card or one numbered card is played; when it's time for your turn again you must play the other. Thus, at the end of the "trick" every player will have one rule card and one value card in front of them. To determine if they have won that trick, a player must look at their rule and everybody's value cards; if the rule was obeyed they keep the rule card and gain points for it at the end of the hand, if not then it goes into the discard pile.

The concept sounds ambitious but the game works very well. I was, in a word, rubbish at this game but that was a case of inexperience more than anythhing else. The game is very neat and well thought-out; I look forward to the opportunity of introducing it to the group.

In a nutshell, Japon Brand are doing a sterling job of introducing their games to the Western world. Like many world-beating Japanese companies they have taken ideas from Europe and America, made improvements and sold back something which challenges the originals. I look forward to next year, when perhaps we will see something else of note to come out of the Land of the Rising Sun.

Siamese Twinge

2007-11-16T18:45:00.000Z

When somebody mentioned this game to me, referring to it as a "very good game" I had to check it out. However the only way I was ever possibly going to do so was by buying my own copy - so I did.

King of Siam is a rather unusual area majority game. Firstly, it is very short in play time, secondly everybody is restricted to the same eight actions to choose from for the entire game and lastly there is more than one way in which victory can be achieved. My only play so far has been with three players, and it is on this particular game that this write-up is based.

The components I cannot fault, the rules are well-written but the gameplay is another matter. To be totally fair to the game I really need to try it again before I decide whether this is for the collection or for the trade pile, but so far I am edging slowly towards the trade pile. I will tell you why.

There are two basic options on a player's turn, play or pass. If he plays, a player must select one of his eight action cards to use and then subsequently removes an influence marker from anywhere on the board. If he passes he does nothing, all players passing means the current round or "struggle" is over. At this point, the dominant faction gains control of the province; if there is a tie the British colonise it.

Now it is simple enough to learn and play this game, perhaps a little more difficult to master. As soon as one player tries to up their influence in one faction it is weakened on the board; this automatically makes the other factions relatively stronger and hence more attractive. The net effect over twenty-four actions (in a three-player game) is that players are liable to be at a roughly equal footing. About half way through our game nobody was clearly closer to victory than anybody else; but soon afterwards it seemed more and more likely the game would end with Siam a British colony. This resulted in everybody trying to create sets, and lo and behold the game ended with everybody on the same number of sets.

The tiebreakers, it seems, are more important to victory than the actual influence. I am probably wrong about that but it seems that way after our first play. Like I said I am probably missing something but this game hardly has the sun shining out of its arse.

I could be eating my words soon; the other two players seemed to like the "closeness" of the game despite that, to me, it felt like a bit of a cop-out. It seems so difficult to actually gain victory outright in this game that the designer has tacked on a couple of tiebreakers for each ending condition. If somebody would like to comment and tell me what I'm missing I would welcome it. Right now I'm thinking of KoS as an interesting experiment prone to failure.

Kingsburg - Possibly an Essen Great.

2007-11-12T15:48:00.000Z

At Essen this year I got to play very few games outside of that which I was demonstrating. One of the few I did get to play, and subsequently added to my shopping list, was Kingsburg. I found this very surprising because based upon initial pre-Essen reports on BGG I felt it was the kind of game for me to steer clear of.

The demonstration game at the Messe, Essen.

Let me explain; when I was introduced to Yspahan not long after last year's Essen I found it only mildly interesting. It felt to me that there was far too much emphasis on the dice rolling and far too little on strategic and/or tactical choices. Yspahan has subsequently been left out of many sessions I have attended for being just a little too chaotic. Sure, there are decisions to be made; but I found that often I was taking Hobson's choice.

Needless to say, when I read the description of Kingsburg I was utterly turned off. Players roll dice and then based on what they roll the turn order is determined and resources may be claimed with which buildings are built. The trouble with a description such as this is that one is led to believe the focus of the game is the dice-rolling; this is misleading in the least, as I found out when I played my first game.

What really happens is that players roll their own individual set of dice every time there is a building season. The game is divided into rounds which represent one year; each year is divided into seasons for which specific actions occur. Three of these are building seasons (in the Winter everybody makes an effort to fend off a common enemy) and at the beginning of each building season the dice each player has are rolled simultaneously. The lower the result the higher you are in the turn order; however the higher your result the more choice you will have in determining what to do with your dice. You see, at this point you will get to use any combination of your dice to influence one or more of the King's advisors, one per turn, until nobody can influence anybody else. For instance, a total of six will get the services of the alchemist, who changes one resource for one each of the other two types; for seventeen the Queen herself will help you, for one you can have a victory point from the court jester and so on. The catch is you cannot (except in special circumstances) influence somebody already influenced, so you have to think carefully about how you will play your dice for best effect.

The benefits you receive depend on who you influence; usually you will receive resources (wood, stone and/or gold) but some advisors get you soldiers (which help when the kingdom is attacked in Winter), points (which help towards victory) or even bonuses which you can use to bolster dice scores for influencing advisors in a following season.

After influencing is dealt with, everybody receives their benefits then may build. This is the most efficient way of earning points, but you have to build each row in a specific order - left to right. Buildings also bring special benefits or actions for their town; for instance a market allows you to slightly alter the score of your die or dice when influencing advisors or a church gives you a bonus when the enemy is demons.

Which brings me to Winter; a common enemy (some of the players may have gained knowledge of it) is revealed and one player rolls against them. All players then adjust their strength accordingly and any victorious players gain bonuses, any losing payers are penalised and must also lose one of their biggest buildings.

The sign of a good game is usually, for me at least, one in which there is a good combination of control and depth; the mere sight of a great quantity of dice should ring alarm bells. But as with any material used in games it is not what is used but how they are used. I can think of at least two other games which use dice that impressed me enough to want to own them; Kingsbburg joins their ranks as the middle weight of the three. There is enough weight in this game for competition to be interesting, just enough interaction to keep things going and just enough strategy that the game isn't overpowered by the system. I would be able to use this game in both gaming circles and with the family, I think; that has to make it a contender for some of the awards we see year in and year out. I can only qualify this statement further by stating in all honesty my desire to play it right now (but I'm trying my best to get through the other Essen titles first, so it might have to wait).

Counter Measures

2007-11-12T10:23:00.000Z

What should a gamer give to his Father when he hasn't seen him for twenty-odd years?

He's looking rather bemused - I wonder if he'll read it?

The Circle

2007-11-08T05:39:00.001Z

When I met the C4 team at Essen I couldn't help but become even more intrigued by their first product, The Circle, than I had been when I first heard about it in previews on BGG. When they showed me the quality of the components it was almost as good as sold; but naturally I had to fulfil other parts of my shopping list first so I waited until the last day to go for a copy of this. That could easily have been a mistake if the game had shifted like the Czech titles were; fortunately for me it wasn't and sure enough I got a copy on the last day of the fair.

At the time The Circle seemed to be an ideal game for our group, which often peaks at six players at any one session. So last night when I attended Mike's session I decided it would be a good time to try it.

The backdrop is the Victorian age, and a secret society called The Circle - more powerful than any other - is hell-bent on world domination. Players represent the intelligence agencies of one of six powers, all with the aim of not only breaking The Circle through intrigue, arrest and infiltration but also outdoing their foreign counterparts in the bargain. This is achieved by first bringing spies onto the market, hiring them and then employing them against The Circle and/or other players.

After some explanation the game was underway; and almost immediately I felt things were running a bit slower than they ought to. Perhaps with this being everybody's first play this is only to be expected, but I sincerely believe there is another reason behind this.

For the first phase of each round, every player gains four secrets - secrets being the currency in the world of international espionage. In order to gain any influence whatsoever over the spies that operate in this twilight existence, those spies have to be brought out into the market with the offer of a couple of secrets - with the exception that one player gets to bring out one spy every round. Of course, the spy brought out in this fashion has no loyalty (in most cases), so all the player's offer of secrets has achieved is, most probably, to give the advantage to somebody else. This is something I found to my detriment early on; I brought out a couple of agents and other players then proceeded to employ them (because they had more secrets than me in the relevant area).

Now this should not really seem like a problem, because if everybody leaves agents alone eventually those available will only be the neutrals - which means anybody who wishes to employ them has to spend secrets and hence one or more players will have reduced their total secrets in any one of the four divisions. This would then leave an incentive for one or more players to bring on agents of a certain colour. However, even bearing in mind that played well enough it should balance out, this delays the opening of the game by a significant degree. It will take several rounds before anybody starts to earn any significant points; in our case it took between thirty minutes and one hour before anybody really got off the mark.

Anyway, the other key point raised by this criticism is that the number and type of actions available to the players will be severely limited until much later in the game. This might be a good thing for fewer players, but with six of us it seemed to take far too long to get underway. As I noticed this, I spent secrets to get the game moving and brought on a couple of agents; however as I had spent secrets to get them on the market I was subsequently out of the market for them! Frustrating!

After around three hours of play (the entire explanation and play of the game took around three and a half hours) the game was brought to an abrupt halt by one player tipping the Circle over the line which resulted in the negative ending condition of world chaos. In this case the losing player is declared the winner. As John pointed out, games which can possibly end in this way usually will, so my worst fear for the future of this game is that should I ever get it to the table again the same ending conditions will occur. I'm almost certain that it is very difficult to do this effectively, because anybody who has infiltrated the Circle could just bring it back below the required score with a bit of self-sacrifice. That said there is far too much potential for a player to throw the game this way and I can't help but wonder if that would be the norm.

So now I am left wondering whether or not this purchase was a good idea. I mean I'd like to think it is but it seems to me there are a few elements which require work here. It seems that either we're completely missing something (and I fail to see how that is the case in all honesty) or the game is.

Of the elements requiring work, the most important is the scaleability. Let's say you're playing with just three players. This means that every round is occuring after every third play, and spies are entering the game twice as fast as with six players. It's possible that a three-player game would last just the ninety minutes quoted on the box, because clearly spies would become available much faster; but with six players it's going to be some time before every player has employed the services of at least one spy. A case in point would be me; for the first half of the game I had nobody working for me. Perhaps the game should start with a few spies already at the wheel, just to speed things up a bit? I suggest trying one per player, drawn at random from the neutrals, placed around the wheel. I might also suggest the possibility of each player starting the game with a couple of spies, perhaps even the two which bear that player's symbol?

Another way to speed up the recruitment and hence the game would be to allow the start player more free activations; instead of a single free grey agent it might be an idea to allow one coloured one too. The obvious downside of this is that it may be too easy for a player to cherry-pick his agents in a division in which he has a clear lead; but then again this has to be a better incentive for other players to introduce other coloured agents to sour the mix.

Secondary to this but important nonetheless is the fact that there were no player reference sheets included. This severely slowed the game down when players had to make choices about whether to bid or not, what they could do with the spies they already had in their employ and what could be done in each phase of the turn.

Apart from these rather significant issues I have with the game, everything about it makes me want to play it again. I absolutely adore the clever core mechanism of the time wheel, dictating which spies become available to hire and when inactive spies become prepared for action again. The components are top notch and the period feel adds to the atmosphere of Victorian imperialism. I find this game very intriguing; we just need to get the play time down. As Nick said at the session last night, The Circle just seems too long for what it is; I am sure under these teething problems is a classic waiting to break out.

A Lazy Essen Report

2007-11-06T08:01:00.000Z

Yes, there I was in the midst of writing multiple articles about my first Essen experience when I realised I really couldn't be bothered. What I ought to be doing instead of writing about it is playing the damn games I managed to get hold of there!

Quinamid pyramids reflect the company logo

Anyway I've decided to write this article as briefly as possible. The first important fact is I never planned on going to Essen at all this year but the opportunity arose when Tony Brown, designer of Quinamid, came online looking for help on his stand via BGG. I decided it would be prudent to ask the Missus and the Boss at work if it was viable before I accepted Tony's offer and so by a fortunate twist of fate I found myself going a year earlier than I had intended. Whilst out there we were joined by a German volunteer, Eike, who proved a valuable member of the team (not least of all because he was the only native German speaker out of the three of us - and the bulk of our customers were German speakers).

After some time the Quinamid stand took shape.

I will make no bones about it, working on a stand in Essen Spiel is not as easy as it seems; but it was worth the effort when I consider the haul. The pros far outweighed the cons; for a start we got there earlier than anybody and essentially had the best choice on the second-hand stalls of the flea market in hall 4. That I didn't really take advantage of this was an oversight on my part; passing up on a copy of Die Händler at the start because I thought the price might drop was a big mistake. Apart from that, being the early birds meant we got the option of first refusal on a lot of sellouts - again, not all were taken advantage of but I feel I made few mistakes as far as being an "Essen virgin" went. When I think about it the only real con was that we never really got the chance to try out any games during the day; nothing stopped us dong this during the evening however.

Not everybody was as ready as we were on Tuesday afternoon.

One such game we managed to try out, apart from Tony's prototype that is, was a game called Kingsburg. I had read about it and had come to the conclusion before the show that it just wasn't for me or any of the groups with whom I play. A couple of nice Italian fellows who were connected with Stratelibri for the duration of the fair, Guiseppe and Piedre, took us through the game in the hotel one evening with a couple of German gamers and a Dutch fellow. I naturally came in last for this first play (that pattern emerged a long time ago), but we all enjoyed it enough that I had to promote it on "the list" from something of interest to a must-have. It was an expensive purchase as I opted for the English-language edition, but for the hours of pleasure I know we will get from it in the future Kingsburg was more than worth the 49 € price tag (other languages were 10 € less).

It's not all about Eurogames, you know.

We had been there so early that I was closing down my "must-have" list before most of the stands were open to custom; at least two vendors told me to come back later because they weren't ready (Ystari sticks in my mind; they were setting up their Caylus display model when I wandered over having just mugged the Fragors for my copies of Antler Island and Hameln). However Martin Wallace and Warfrog were more than ready to sell me a copy of Brass, even though they hardly had anything out of the boxes. Martin accompanied me back to our stand to give Tony and the rest of us some advice which I thought was very decent of him - thank you Martin.

The calm before the storm - designer Tony Brown demonstrates his game early on during the fair.

In the same area as the Warfrogs was Ted Alspach, proprietor of Bezier Games and purveyor of several maps for the number one rail game Age of Steam. It was a real pleasure to meet Ted, as was it to meet all who had been accompanying him for games in the hotel. The evening we got there Greg Schloesser was amongst them; a really pleasant fellow I can assure you. In fact I have to say that the Americans I met in Essen were all very polite, endearing people and a credit to their nation. I must apologise for not remembering the names of everybody who sat at that table playing Cuba on the Tuesday evening but as they were engrossed in the game the formality of introductions was overlooked. A couple of days later we met Jeff, Steph and Ron from Los Angeles who showed us this amazing Japanese card game called Master of rules (that went on the "must have" list too). I digress; where was I? Oh yes, I bought a couple of maps off Ted which I shall be using to torture my regular "Steamers" with - and I'm really looking forward to it. I don't really favour the whacky scenarios some of the maps depict, such as the Moon or the Sun or Soul Train so I made certain I only got historical or semi-historical maps of real world locales.

It looks like Tony's won again - no surprise there then.

Back to the fair; there are a strange mix of people indeed who attend - the young, the old, the gamers, the players, the role-players, the live-action role-players, the reenactors, the reactionaries, the collectors, the buyers and the sellers to name but a handful. There was much more going on than just games but with limited time available my original plan of trawling the comic-book stands for a few titles I was after went straight out of the window. During each day food and drink were never a problem because within ten metres of our stand was a crepes stand with a bratwurst stand right next to it. Coffee was readily available where the crepes could be bought and I could be frequently seen chasing my caffiene fix there.

In hall 5 was this CCG stand; complete with half-naked elf mannequin. I'm sure I've seen her somewhere before...

Just across from us was the Golden Laurel stand where their representative was promoting Kill The Hippies and Galactic Destiny; across the other way was Giochix.it from Italy, selling their Medievalia and Bulp card games. We were flanked by the French publishers of Astoria and Tavern Brawl, Role et Strategie Editions, on one side and one of the many new and second-hand vendors on the other. It was a very cosmopolitan mix; English, Canadian, French and Italian all bunched together selling to a primarily German clientelle. Of course there were many German firms wiithin spitting distance of our stand too; a group of young ladies were being employed selling a very colourful range of games (educational games I think, but it looked like some of their products had potential for other uses) just beyond the Italians' stand. They had been given rainbow-coloured waistcoats which I thought looked rather dapper. One girl let me try hers on and I must say I looked the bees knees in it; unfortunately no amount of Quinamid t-shirts or offers of money or beverages could make them part with one because they had to return them to their employer. Damn shame really; it would have really suited me.

Our French neighbours had an awesome display for their games.

Thursday seemed relatively slow compared to the other three days during which the fair was open. Indeed Thursday was slow enough that it allowed all three of us to indulge in a bit of wandering around the fair with our shopping lists. By the time Thursday was over I had everything written on my "must-have" list except one item, and all of Mike's must-haves had been fulfilled along with a good portion of his "if not too expensive" list. I felt some of the prices were rather borderline so I telephoned Mike back in England to make sure I was doing the right thing.

The advantage to working on a stand becomes evident when you first arrive in the morning, walk past the queues and into the hall. We were usually one of the first groups in, which meant we would be ready at our stand a good thirty minutes before anybody arrived. On Friday morning Tony took advantage of this and went wandering around hall 12 near the East entrance. He left it a little too late, however, and experienced what can only be described as a "January Sales" type stampede when the gates were opened. He said he'd never seen anything like it and avoided being there at that time for the rest of the fair.

At this time of the morning the main hall is empty - except for the odd arctic nomad just passing through, of course.

If the stampede was bad on Friday I can only imagine what it must have been like on Saturday. Naturally this was the busiest day of the four; while hall 4 was almost breathable when any of us ventured out to answer the call of nature it was a battle to get back to the stand. As a matter of fact, if one was unfortunate enough to require "number two" they were actually queueing for the traps. I pity the poor unfortunate who followed me in - a sudden change in diet to bratwurst and mustard doesn't help the digestive tract much if you're not used to it!

I digress; Saturday was the day I chose to visit the odd stand looking for the games I had difficulty finding in the first place. First on the list was Sierra Madre Games, who were residing in the adjacent hall 6. I had probably passed them umpteen times but never saw them; when I found them designer Phil Eklund was all too keen to tell me all about his latest game Origins - How We Became Human. I had been interested in it anyway, but once he described it to me I was gripped. It became a must-buy when he explained that a combination of mechanisms were used to simulate humankind's expansion and which subspecies (between, for example, Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal and Peking Man) would become dominant through the development of its own brain; essentially becoming human. Phil was in the middle of a game with some eager players, but took the time out to explain everything about this and one of his other titles, American Megafauna. I ended up walking away with both and I look forward to playing them both in one of my longer sessions - I best get reading those rules!

Sunday was quiet in comparison to Saturday; by then I was done with the essentials so anything I bought was extra. Still, I tried to be careful and selective; the last thing I wanted to do for my first visit to Essen was return with far too many cheap but mediocre games when I could have a few good ones. To make things much easier for me I decided to concentrate on what Mike had down on his "buy if not too expensive" list, for which he had a bit of money left over. As it turned out I went a little over budget for him, but I'm sure he appreciated my efforts. I decided at this point it was time to visit the two Czech companies; CBG had raffled off the right to buy a copy of Through The Ages. I had decided to avoid this and wait for FRED Distribution to issue the reprint, so I simply asked for a copy of Jantaris and one of Laborigines. Then I went out to the gallery to snag a copy of Galaxy Trucker and League of Six from CGE - only to find they had run out of English copies of both games! Dismayed, I asked where I might get one and they told me several distributors and shops had ordered some from them and if they hadn't taken theirs by 3pm I could come back and get a copy. Sure enough I returned and was lucky enough to get Galaxy Truckers. That'll teach me not to wait where new games or limited print runs are concerned!

The final haul - just my stuff of course.

Well other than the hard work packing everything away that's about it; I will endeavour to tell you more about the details later but as far as my lazy Essen report goes that's a wrap!

Dearth of Posts

2007-11-02T14:27:00.000Z

It's not as if I don't have anything to say - I went to Essen this year, I have a ton of new games and I never shut up. I just can't be bothered, that's all. I have a few interesting posts in the pipeline but for now you're just going to have to make do with this semi-apologetic one.

Chesapeake & Ohio Railways

2007-09-14T10:07:00.000+01:00

There are a lot of expansions out there for the classic Age of Steam; in my personal opinion there are a couple of problems with most of them. The first is you have to pay for them, and the second is - more importantly - the knock-on effect this has on availability. However one or two people have designed maps which they have allowed to be available for free download - most of these are very good maps indeed, and all you need is a little bit of patience, a little bit of paper, a little bit of printer ink and the files themselves. Voila, an Age of Steam expansion.

When I invited the group around for a session last night, there were offers of all sorts of commercially produced expansions from the others; however I thought it better to save those for somebody else's session as I like to have things set up before my guests arrive (no need to discuss what we're going to play in that case). So, I tootled off to BGG and found the Chesapeake & Ohio expansion by David Fair. Described as a map for four to six players, which were the numbers I was potentially hosting, I downloaded and printed it (not perfectly - I will probably do a mounted version later).

The early game, in which almost everybody else tries to grab a piece of my factory action.

This map has a couple of special rules which make it very interesting; the first dispenses with the Production action and the associated goods growth, production being influenced directly by the players through the building of factories. A player may build such a factory instead of building track during the build track phase of the turn; admittedly I got this rule a little wrong and managed to confuse this with the Factory action which replaces Production and allows a player to build both in a turn. As a result we played that you had to choose the Factory action to build one at all; I have to say it did affect the way the game evolved but not that much; four factories were built during the entire game (two by one player) and considering we were four in number that was plenty.

The second interesting rule addition is the multiple shipment rule, in which a player may deliver a good to one city and then continue by shipping from the same city (provided his locomotive is capable of course). This rule seems to add value to the locomotive action (as if it wasn't valuable enough) and is the second rule that makes up for the sparse production brought on by the lack of goods growth.

The endgame, and competition is not much hotter.

All in all we thought it was a very dynamic map; the factory rules were in part responsible for this as was the special multiple shipment rule (I believe this mechanism was borrowed from another expansion). However with four players this map just didn't feel tight enough; one or two more players would have made all the difference. For the first half of the game nobody had any trouble from any other player, and the screwage factor was just shy of nasty towards the endgame. All players managed to set up workable six link routes for themselves by the endgame and half the players actually managed to use them effectively. Nobody was poor on this map either, despite the fact one player had to reduce income early on. I would estimate that six players is the sweet spot for this map, five would certainly add more tension to the game too and the way it would play out could depend heavily on the starting goods draw. I wonder if this map would suffer much if the goods were to be left off the towns (at least for a four-player game).

In summary, David's map is truly a keeper even though I feel it isn't tight enough with four. I could be pleasantly surprised next time we play, but I think allowing any player to build a factory instead of track could allow too many goods to trickle through at this number of players. I will have to see how it goes with five or six - perhaps Mr Oakes will break from his abstinence for this one? Kudos to David for an excellent and well-planned design.

A Disappointing Discovery?

2007-09-12T11:30:00.000+01:00

There has been much controversy over the demise of Eagle Games last year; I personally think Glenn Drover's new company, Tropical Games, should have perhaps took the title Phoenix Games from the manner in which it seemed to rise from the flames.

But enough on the politics of it all, for after last night's session I can now try and put your mind to rest regarding the much-discussed vanguard of his new Tropical Games label; Age of Empires III - The Age of Discovery. Like many of his previously published (and previously promised) boardgames, Age of Empires III is themed on a computer game of the same name. I've never played it but I am in no doubt it is a real-time strategy in which buildings are built for various functions and units are built to gather resources, fight enemies or for some other purpose.

Naturally a boardgame cannot be a real-time strategy; but the underlying theme of the exploration and conquest of the New World has been transferred successfully into this carefully considered design. The end product is a finely-tuned balance between risk and strategy, our group thoroughly enjoyed it - so much that they didn't realise that the passage of time had gone way beyond the stated ninety minutes!

Portuguese influence in the New World was slowly being choked out of existence

Each player represents one of five European powers competing to discover and exploit the New World and other undiscovered territories. In oirder to do this they must send out soldiers to pillage the natives and deal with opponents, captains to make thier discoveries, merchants to trade with the locals, missionaries to convert them to Christianity and of course colonists to, well, colonise.

The game unfolds thorugh a series of action selection rounds reminiscent of Wallace's Way Out West (though I am almost certain a similar system has been used elsewhere this is the best example that springs to mind). Players place colonists and specialists in various spaces to carry out various actions. Some have limited places, others do not; they include a trade goods section where goods may be obtained (which earn income but are never actually traded between players), a specialist section where the specialists may be gained or trained, capital building spaces where one of a number of available "buildings" may be bought (tiles each carrying their own benefit - though some don't sound like buildings at all) and the colonists dock where colonists and specialists embark for the colonies in the New World.

The number of rounds played is fixed, with scoring for the colonies taking place at the end of every age (endgame scoring being most involved) and every age consisting of two or three such rounds up to a total of eight. This seems to me to be a little unbalanced in some respects, because the end of age scoring (as opposed to the endgame) doesn't seem to earn very much at all. however I'll take the designer's word for it that every game should feel different and I'll see how it goes next time.

I cannot say hand-on-heart that this game did not carry with it some disappointment for me; I thought the components could have been better for a start, but that's never really a problem and the play is the thing. In all honesty I will have to play it again a few times before I can finally decide its fate because a game of such complexity may be masking the possibility of more than one or two workable strategies. However at several points in the game it seemed to me there were a couple of problems. First of these is a perceptible monopolisation of the action selection; should a single player continually gain more pieces for placement it will be very difficult to stop him making the best of every subsequent turn. Similarly a player who gains income at a greater rate than others early on is automatically empowered to carry out the more beneficial actions (capital buildings, extra specialists and so on) without any real intervention from the trailer(s). Of all the minor disappointments I experienced the worst was that I had bought a game for six players which only contains enough pieces for five to play - yet I still wonder if five is too many!

I am looking forward to our next game, hopefully towards the end of the week; it seems there is enough going on here that everybody in the group wants to try it some more just to see if they can eke out a few alternative strategies. I can't see many myself, so I am looking forward to proving myself wrong!

Amazing Razing - Warrior Knights Crown & Glory

2007-09-10T09:45:00.000+01:00

At one of my scheduled Sunday sessions yesterday we managed to try out the expansion to FFG's Warrior Knights; Crown & Glory. The expansion adds elements to the play in the form of three subexpansions - For Glory, Missions and The King - each adding something to the existing basic game. As the rules indicated an extended play time for the King variant I decided not to use it for this sitting and opted to use only the other two.

The strongholds and then the nobles are deployed.

For Glory adds in several new elements which greatly enhance the atmosphere of the game and slightly dilute the significance of both the Assembly Chairman and Head of Faith. Most notable in this latter respect is the introduction of knowledge rules and the Scholar, represented by book tokens and a quill token respectively. A whole new deck of what can only be described as technological advancements are used, with benefits ranging from the black powder (deals extra casualties in one battle per turn) and alchemy (earns extra gold during taxation). Each of these technologies is available by trading in knowledge for them; in our session Neil was the first to grasp its significance well enough to take advantage of alchemy, but I soon folowed suit and developed iron-forged swords and the black powder - which between them gave me the edge in battle for the rest of the game and made up for the poor start I had.

Another important addition is the garrison; this is one of a number of elements of the expansion which bring the new version closer to Derek Carver's predecessor, the Games Workshop version from the mid-1980's. Garrisons may be raised and kept in up to eight towns by the players, adding extra strength. This proved quite useful to Neil, discouraging offensive moves against his cities in the early game and defending them well in the late game. Unlike the original garrisons, these are represented by a counter on the board and a card; I can't help thinking it would have been more intuitive to have everything on the counter like the old version. I suppose the intent may have been to ease a player's reference when wages are paid but I can't help asking myself if the cards were really necessary.

Some cards that were necessary, in the original game if you ask my opinion, are the town levies. these too were a feature of the old game but work slightly differently here. In the old version they were raised automatically on the capture of a town; in this version they are mustered under one of the neutral actions. As in the original they simply add to the strength of an existing army and remain in a noble's employ until such a time as they desert or are killed. In our game yesterday there were several levies which could have been raised but never were; nobles would take cities and move on, and without any nobles present at the appropriate city the owner was unable to muster them.

Another addition was an alternative to the revolt; in some cases cities riot instead and behave like the city is unowned until the riot is quelled. However for some reason (probably because I was recovering from the night before) we forgot to check for revolts - though to be fair there were very few turns in our game when a city was left unguarded.

Black Nobles cunningly camp outside key cities in the North as the King lies dying.

And for me the most impressive element of this variant was the introduction of leaders and heralds in the mercenary deck, even though I never actually got any during play. Heralds allow nobles to field mercenaries at less cost in wages, while leaders infer special abilities - such as drawing extra cards or dealing more casualties and so on. While we're on the subject of wages, some of the new action cards were used so often by players (forced march springs to mind) that the wages phase was the most common variable occurrence during the whole game. On more than one occasion I ended up losing troops to wages phases, fortunately it affected everybody one way or another.

The other variant used from the expansion was the Missions variant; now those who read my blog fairly regularly may know my thoughts on the tycoon cards in Railroad Tycoon. well these mission cards are the same as those; you get one at the start of the game and at the end you gain extra influence for completing the mission. I have to say they are not as bad as the tycoon cards, giving only two points apiece but they can make a difference in a game as close as ours was. Neil gained his points for managing to raze a couple of cities; Hatti got hers too but both mine and Tom's were a little too elusive.

The Green Baron dominated the South-West but still faced defeat.

The final scores were Tom at 19, Neil at 18, 17 for myself and 15 for Hatti; but had I completed my mission (and it wouldn't have been too hard had I tried) then I would have took the victory on the tie-breaker, which was the number of cities. I think I would prefer either not to use them at all; alternatively we could use them a different way such as having a pool of them so every player can try for them - I haven't given it much thought other than I don't really like them.

So next time we'll be using the King variant, which I am led to believe will probably shorten the game in comparison to our standard 15 influence per player variant. We'll see; it's some way off yet!

From Tyre to Paris

2007-09-04T18:30:00.000+01:00

It's not unusual for us to play a single long game at Mike's session, but last week we got in two mid-length games. One was relatively new to those in attendance, the other completely new.

First up was Mike's copy of Phoenicia, the new flagship of JKLM, a simplified reworking of the model underpinning the classic game of Outpost. I say "reworking", but there is a lot more balance, a lot less fiddliness and a much better playing time for a game of this nature; the historical theme is helpful too. In the past Outpost's core model was reworked as The Sceptre of Zavandor - a game I now own but have yet to play. But Phoenicia is a little bit more significant a reworking because it has been stripped down to the essentials and yet seems to lose nothing but playing time. This simply indicates how much time is wasted playing the original when the same effect, the same challenge if you will, is evident in this condensed adaptation. On the other hand, it is the slow build-up of Outpost that keeps its appeal for some; personally I didn't rate it that highly because it is usually crystal clear many turns before the end if you're in with a chance or you haven't a hope in hell - at this point it would be more prudent in my humble opinion to declare a winner and have done with it rather than plodding through and playing out the last two or three long turns. Thankfully, this is the main advantage Phoenicia has over its ancestor; neither is it clear who is going to win nor is it a drag working through those last couple of turns.

What you start off with - at one point I thought it would be what I finish with.

The game sees players building elements of their city-state, hiring and training workers to become farmers, hunters or as technology develops miners. With the income gathered from these efforts players may build, the end product being more income, more workers, more storage, greater technology and of course victory points. As the game draws closer to a climax the available buildings get more expensive and worth more points. Eventually somebody will reach a certain number of points and the endgame is triggered. After this final turn has been completed the game finishes and the player who has amassed the most points wins.

The central board - at this stage it's anybody's game.

One other plus for this new game, apart from its comparative efficiency, is that JKLM are sticking to their new-found level of quality as witnessed in their last big release On The Underground. The box is solid, the cards properly cut and coated, the board professional and even the die-cut buildings are of solid stock. I prefer wooden pieces but even though there are now lots of plastic pawns, cubes and houses in this game there can be no argument about their quality. However, they did make a bit of a boob in early copies by not including enough cubes for the players to indicate their progress on the board; this is something that Markus Welbourne of JKLM is keenly correcting though for our game it wasn't an issue as Mike's copy came complete. I cannot help but feel that their partnership with Rio Grande has gone some way to influencing this; I sincerely hope the success keeps on flowing.

If you look closely you will see my green points marker just edging into the picture...

The second game of the evening was new to all present; Stefan Feld's Notre Dame, number eleven in the Alea "big-box" series. The game is one of influence and cunning in the district around the famous cathedral during Medieval times when the hunchback is in full swing (ringing any bells yet?). Each player has a district in front of them and must place their influence to gain gold, points and more influence in order to further gain influence elsewhere. The different buildings in their district have different functions; for example the hospital reduces the effects of plague, the park earns extra points and the coach-house allows them to move their carriage from market to market around the city (which in turn allows the collection of markers for extra points, gold and influence).

Have coach will travel - around Paris

It sounds pretty much standard area influence fare right now, doesn't it? Well, there is a rather clever card drafting mechanism helping things along. Each player has their own deck of action cards and each turn takes three from the top. From these three they can only keep one for themselves then must pass the other two to the left, subsequently taking two from the right. From the two received they must then choose one for themselves, passing the final card to the left and receiving their final card from the right. The final snag is they will only get to play two of those three cards they finally keep!

It really is a clever system, one of those that is so simple I dare say many designers are thinking "Why didn't I do that?" I also think there is every possibility it has been used before (other than in the classic card game of Hearts), but it is unlikely it has been used so cleverly.

After this they were thinking of renaming the black death to the green death.

Anyway, after two turns of placing cubes, taking whatever for them and scoring points players get to hire one of three available characters before the round ends and points are shared on a per-cube basis for influence in the cathedral. These characters allow various rule-bending benefits; some give extra points and bonuses, some will allow you to ignore certain penalties and others allow you to move your cubes around for maximum benefit in the upcoming round. Three rounds are played before the game actually ends, at which point the player with the most VP wins.

Essentially we have a mixture of familiar mechanisms here presented in such a way that this game could possibly be the best design of 2007 so far. Play it and you will not be disappointed.

Introductions

2007-08-30T12:08:00.000+01:00

Tuesday night I was fortunate enough to get to try a couple of new games. First up was It’s Alive!, the published implementation of Yehuda Berlinger’s much self-publicised Menorah Game rethemed by Reiver Games to appeal to a wider audience. Players take the role of Frankenstein type mad anatomical scientists attempting to recreate life from body parts. Each have a screen behind which is their slab (on which body parts are placed) and in front of which is a cemetery (from which body snatchers may obtain body parts).

The core element of the game is body parts drawn from a deck or stolen from a graveyard by the local ne’er-do-wells (at a cost of course). The current player can sell the body part, auction it off Goa style or buy it at face value for themselves. The manner in which this anatomical economy works is also slightly reminiscent of Modern Art insofar as buying something from your own draw/auction results in the money going out of circulation and into the bank, whilst buying from another player sends it straight into their coffers (or perhaps in this case it could be “coffins”!).

It's alive! It's alive!

In all I found the game to be both fun and challenging; Reiver Games have done a grand job with the components as well and the whole change of theme really added to the atmosphere – most of the group agree candles wouldn’t have the same appeal somehow. There was one snag; we decided against playing the full five rounds the rules advise due to time constraints, and there seemed to be some indication that one round per player, though fair, would not appeal and might make the game a touch too long for what it is - since our game took around forty-five minutes three hours too long! Still, I’m willing to try it as long as the group is because I found it a lot of fun.

The second new game of the evening – to us, at least – was Reiner Knizia’s Beowulf. I’d heard tales of woe and tales of triumph regarding this game, and trying it for myself I can see why some were disappointed. At least one player felt they had reached an irrevocable position about half way through the game and it seemed almost impossible to get back into the game once a certain level of wounds was reached. However, I think had we played the advanced game things may have turned out a little differently.

At the heart of Beowulf is a card system which takes the basic premise of Knizia’s Lord of the Rings game but uses it competitively. Thus, in every episode of this saga some symbols are useful and others not. Players compete to gain gold and fame – in the basic version we played they amount to the same thing, but in the advanced version gold is used in particular stages to pay for benefits or penalty avoidance. The problem some players had with it was due to getting so far down there was no coming back; it seems this gives the game an inherent runaway leader problem, but I'm not so sure. If the leading player is pushed to part with most of his cards he becomes much weaker in the later episodes and this can only be good for the trailers. The trouble is, how can the trailers force this if, by virtue of their being the trailers, they earn less benefit anyway? I will have to see what happens in the next game before I pass judgement on this one

I really like the risk system used here; some might say that is another unfair advantage and totally dependent on the luck of the draw but I found it was just right as a mechanism for drawing cards when short. Where the chaos really hit home for me is the use of the blind scroll counters which bestow fame and fortune upon the player - this means a differential of up to five points between the first chooser and the last - simply because the luckiest draw was made. If that last player is about to receive a wound, then that could equate to a differential of eleven.

Despite all this, I found Beowulf a fun game which really followed the theme of the Saxon saga well. It is now provisionally on my "maybe" list but as I am still trying to reduce numbers in my collection it could be a while before the room is there and I can think of better games to fill it.

Tied to the Tracks

2007-08-21T20:18:00.000+01:00

At Mr Oakes’ hosted session last week, after I objected to a rule I was, as it turned out, wrong about (apologies, gentlemen), we settled into a game of Railroad Tycoon. This was the first time I had played for a while, on the original map that is. I think I am finally getting used to it because it seemed to flow a lot better and I wasn’t trailing everybody else by an obscene number of issued shares. I think this was probably due to everybody at the table having played before and being at least semi-aware of what cards would possibly become available during play.

However while the entire game was another good experience I found myself at game end trying to come to terms with the fact that I could do nothing about the arbitrary penalty I had been given in the form of my Tycoon. You see, I had been dealt the fellow who had to connect Chicago to New York to gain his bonus; yet from the start I was unable to compete for any of the meaningful connections out of either New York or Chicago. By turn three a connection into New York was impossible, but even if it hadn’t been impossible connecting it to Chicago would have cost much more than I was prepared to sacrifice. Indeed, I would quite literally have lost myself seven or more points for the sake of gaining five.

Most of the players involved were well-trained.

Frankly, I knew from turn three I had lost the game; if everybody is competing for income and some as it happens have tycoons which benefit from standard game actions then the only players with real potential are these players. Herein lies the core problem with RT; a close game is decided not by the best decision; it is decided by the best bonus points draw. I don’t mind this, but I have to say I don’t really like it either.

It’s odd, isn’t it – there are so many points at which the game can foul up your plans – the right card comes up at the right time for one of your opponents to take advantage of a bonus, the wrong colours are drawn from the bag when you choose a city growth card. Yet the card I know about from the start of the game bothers me most – usually because it is often the card I can do the least about.

Don’t get me wrong, I would still play the game as it stands; but that random tycoon element just riles me a little bit. Actually all the cards do, but the tycoons especially. Bring on Age of Steam Third Edition – now there’s a real rail game!

The Rising Price of Games?

2007-07-24T17:49:00.000+01:00

A few months back, I had an interesting find. I can't remember which game I had bought, but tucked inside was an old games catalogue from 1982 for a games shop in Cardiff (FC Parker). Apart from making interesting reading (which I may cover in another post) I found it puts the value and pricing of boardgames and hobby games in the UK in perspective.

In order to test just how much game prices differ from the present, I found a site which calculates inflation from any year back to the thirteenth century relative to any earlier year (up to 2006). Naturally, there are a lot of other economic factors involved in why prices differ then and now; so remember this doesn't really prove anything - it's just for fun and I personally find it interesting.

Having found a calculator, I then had to work my way through the catalogue, hopefully pinpointing games which are still retailing today. This was a very difficult task; most products from back then are not in print at all these days, and those that are have been redesigned or at least issued in different formats or editions. It was inevitable, therefore, that an alternative pricing source be used for some titles in finding their modern "equivalent"; so in many cases below as close a matching example as I could be bothered with was chosen. I have deliberately gone with regular retail prices, although I am aware these items could be even cheaper than indicated today. These are just a few I tried this with:

221B Baker Street: The classic game of deduction based on the character Sherlock Holmes was on sale then and (albeit in a different edition) still available now. 1982 price: £6.99 Equivalent worth in 2006: £17.05 2007 price: £18.99

Boggle: The ubiquitous dice-driven word-game was around long before 1982 and is probably going to be around for some time to come. 1982 price: £4.75 Equivalent worth in 2006: £11.59 2007 price: £9.99

Diplomacy: Gibson's Games have long been producing this, and despite slight format changes there is little difference to the components from 1982 (even though it is listed as the Ariel version in this little catalogue I found). The later AH version (with the metal pieces) is obviously not considered here. 1982 price: £8.49 Equivalent worth in 2006: £20.71 2007 price: £19.99

Titan: Although long unpublished by Avalon Hill, the game is soon to be reissued by Valley Games who predict a price tag of around $70 US if you don't preorder. I am being generous in converting that at 1:2 for sterling, but then again if I preorder that won't be far off. 1982 price: £11.95 Equivalent worth in 2006: £29.15 2007 price: £35

AD&D Player's Handbook: The RPG market has changed tremendously in the past twenty-five years; the competition for archaic systems such as that which was once used by TSR has meant a lot of changes. AD&D now utilises the d20 system; I don't know much about it but I do know that the differences are not as great as I first imagined (if it isn't broken, don't fix it). 1982 price: £8.50 Equivalent worth in 2006: £20.73 2007 price: £16.99

Hare & Tortoise: The catalogue does not indicate which version, but judging from the year I am almost certain it will almost certainly not have been the original Intellect version and more likely was the Waddingtons or Gibsons version. Naturally, it's a different edition these days. 1982 price: £7.99 Equivalent worth in 2006: £19.49 2007 price: £19.98

The following games are now only available second-hand, so the 2007 price listed is the average selling price for a new copy from BGG (or a rough conversion if it wasn't sold over here), except in the case of Apocalypse which has never been sold new on BGG:

Mythology: It's a game I've never played, and looking at the prices of imports back then it hardly comes as any surprise. 1982 price: £10.95 Equivalent worth in 2006: £26.71 2007 price: £50.00

War of the Ring: The SPI version, naturally. I found it quite astonishing how inexpensive it was back then; it may have been a misprint in the catalogue but then again I have heard the game wasn't all that good anyway. 1982 price: £9.95 Equivalent worth in 2006: £24.27 2007 price: £60.00

Apocalypse: A Games Workshop reissue of a much rarer game called Warlord, this has reached its own rare status. It had experienced a price drop of one whole pound (gasp!). 1982 price: £6.95 Equivalent worth in 2006: £16.95 2007 price: £45.00

Essentially, the value of boardgames in this country hasn't changed much at all. More on this later.