First Impressions of Wizard's Quest, Glory to Rome and The Speicherstadt (November 2010)

This is something slightly different to my normal session reports. It is more of summary of thoughts and opinions about some of the games I've played for the first time in November.

Wizard's Quest
(Played: Wednesday 3 November at Peter's place)
Wizard's Quest is a 1979 Avalon Hill game that has been sitting on Peter's shelf for years. He has mentioned it once or twice as a simple dice-battler, but hasn't made any serious effort to get it played. Lately I have been thinking about "dice-battlers" and I found a re-write of the Avalon Hill rules into plain English. So I got it on the table and got Peter and Nigel to play it with me.

Wizard's Quest turns out to be a step sideways from the usual Risk inspired conquer-the-world dice battler games. Firstly each player is aiming to be the first to recover their three treasures which the opposing players have put in awkward places on the board. Secondly there are orcs and a dragon which are hostile to everyone (and orcs seem to breed faster than humans!). Thirdly even though armies vary in size and battles can last several rounds of dice throwing, in each round each player only throws one die. Each time they throw the die they calculate what "die-range" to use. If you throw a number in the range (1..N) you kill that many enemy units. Throw a number that is too big and you kill no-one - unless both players throw too high and then they both loose one unit (this final part was a rule we overlooked). Basically N is the number of soldiers or orcs in the army if there less than 4 otherwise N is 4 (though there are modifiers for terrain etc). What may not be immediately obvious is that an army of 2 is about three times as powerful as an army of 1, and an army of 3 is about six times as powerful as an army of 1.

Each round of the game starts with the non-player forces (the orcs, the dragon and the wizard). These act randomly. This is assisted by having the board divided into 6 numbered regions and each region divided into 6 numbered spaces. So two die rolls will identify any space on the board (well not quite as there are 8 castles in addition to the 36 numbered spaces). Orcs fill up empty spaces and castles and breed and then go on the rampage once they reach their maximum army size of 4. The dragon flies around the board eating orcs and humans though once he has eaten humans he stops. The wizard causes peace (which is a mixed blessing) in the region he visits and has a deck of card which are mostly helpful.

The orcs tended to frenzy in my direction, while Peter and Nigel got their first two treasures quite easily (Peter carved his way through my main force to get to one of them). Somehow I managed to get to my second treasure before Nigel got to his third to win the game in about 90 minutes if I remember right. As I eluded to earlier we overlooked one rule.

There are huge amounts of luck due to the non-player forces and the cards. The orcs and dragon can set you back so much that it can take 2 or 3 turns to recover. Hence the game could drag on for a long time if everyone suffered this fate. The quantity of luck can reduce the feeling of skill and reduce the opportunity for long term strategic planning. On the plus side despite the long sequence of actions in a round, the game flows quite smoothly and each battle is quick and simple.

Overall I'd class this as a refreshing, though more random and slightly silly alternative to Nexus Ops as a quick "dice-battler" when you don't have hours to spare on one of the longer games of this type.

Glory to Rome
(Played: Friday 5 November at home)
Anna and Andrew brought back a new card game from Brisbane, which Anna tried to entice me to play by telling me that I "might not like it"! After a couple of weeks of this I called her bluff and we played it with Nigel one Friday night (while Sharon, Anne and John B played On the Underground at the other end of the table).

The theme of the game is that the players are dodgy property developers rebuilding Rome after the fire in 64AD. Points are gained by completing buildings and by hording building materials.

Like Race for the Galaxy and Puerto Rico where someone chooses an action and everyone gets to do it, the current start player decides the action that everyone will do. Unlike Race and Puerto Rico this is not done by choosing from a special set of cards or tiles but by playing a card from one's hand. The cards are multi purposed (they are building materials, buildings made of those materials and specific actions). The other players can either play a card with same action (colour) or pick up. Those that play can also do the action. This can be mitigated by getting clientele cards in your display. These can get you actions when they match the card the start player played regardless of whether you played a card or picked up. Completed buildings also give you extra powers.

Why play Glory to Rome when you can play Race for the Galaxy? Because it is more interactive than Race for the Galaxy, which has a multi-player solitaire feel to it. Not only can the start player (or "Leader" in Glory to Rome terminology) can choose actions that are more beneficial to themselves than their opponents. Some action affect other people directly and some actions affect the pool of cards to draw from. So if you like that style of game where you choose action for yourself and other players but you want more interaction than you get with Race for the Galaxy then try Glory to Rome.

The Speicherstadt
(Played: Wednesday 10 November at Peter's place)
In The Speicherstadt by Stefan Feld, you are an importer in the Speicherstadt (warehouse district) in Hamburg, buying ship-lots of goods to try and fulfill specific contracts for victory points. You can also sell, trade, save goods and also firemen to protect your warehouses. Most of this is done by acquiring cards. Each round a number of cards are available and the players bid for the cards. Nothing unusual as Euro games go.

But the point of difference with The Speicherstadt (apart from its name) is the bidding mechanism. This is an interesting (and often frustrating) hybrid of "worker placement" and auction. Each player has 3 meeples and over 3 rounds place these above the cards they wish to bid on. The first meeple placed above a card gives its owner first "dibs" on the card, the second and subsequent meeples give their owners second and third "dibs" etc. After all the meeples are placed then the cards are evaluated left to right. The player owning the first meeple above a card decides whether to buy the card at a price equal to the total number of meeples above it or remove his/her meeple (hence dropping the price) and letting the owner of the next meeple decide whether to buy or not.

People use the cards they buy to fullfill contracts etc. If someone ends up not buying a card they get a consolation coin. There isn't much money in the game. Knowledge of the distribution of cards is very important. There are only limited numbers of each type of card and the deck is built up of 4 sub-decks (called seasons) each with their own characteristic (e.g. ships are rare at the beginning of the game and common at the end)

There are elements here of "worker placement" as players claim dibs on cards, bidding the price up as players stack their meeples above a popular card and dutch auction as players remove their meeples dropping the price for remaining players. This bidding mechanic is both clever and frustrating. Being first player gives you full choice of "first dibs" spots but little control over prices. Being last give you the opposite situation.

This game seems to be a straight forward and slightly boring do stuff to get points game driven by a very clever bidding mechanic. I would like to see this bidding mechanism used in an otherwise more interesting game. If you like trading games there are the nastier games like Before The Wind and Die Händler, or more negotiation oriented games like Settlers of Catan and Bohnanza.