Giganten revisited

(Played: 20 November at home)
Gigenten is a game with nice bits and a reputation (in Peter's group) of being too long. I suspect that the cuprit for this reputation is that most times we've played it we have misunderstood one of the rules. I was keen to play it with the correct rules and knowing that this was highly unlikely to happen at Peter's place due to its reputation I borrowed it from Peter.

The game is about drilling for oil in Texas and more importantly selling the oil for a decent profit. Most of the board is the oil field, a grid of mostly dull brown squares, with the occasional green hill or grey mountain. Scattered around the desert are some face down tiles with 1, 2 or 3 drilling rigs on the back. Along one side of the board are some parallel train tracks (one per player and one for the "black train"). At one end of the board there are oil tanks for three oil companies each with their own price chart. The oil prices vary randomly and by player actions.

Drilling for oil is a simple process of driving a cute little truck around the board and turning over tile, paying for a drilling rig and finding out from the number on the hidden side of the tile how much oil you will be getting. Transporting the oil to the tanks is also trivial, whereas selling the oil depends on winning auctions. Each turn only one player will get to sell oil to each oil company. The players bid against each other using oil certificates, the highest bidder gets to sell oil at that companies current oil price and if anyone else has more than a couple of barrels of oil they must sell the excess at the rock bottom price of $1000 per barrel.

There are elements of managing both your money and your oil production (there is no point in paying to drill for oil, possibly paying to transport it if you are then forced to sell it at below cost price).

Each turn there are a number of cards to choose from which determine your actions for the turn (except selling which is determined by the aforementioned auctions). There is one red card plus a number of brown cards equal to the number of players. The rule we have gotten wrong in the past is that the red card determines how far the black train moves regardless of whether someone chooses the red card or not. Previously we have only moved the black train if some chose the red card. Given that the game ends when the black train reaches the end of the track, not moving it on some turns stretches the game beyond its design length.

Perhaps with three players we were playing too conservatively but there was no competition for drill sites, no trouble shipping oil back on ones own train and little competition to sell oil (at least in the first half of the game). This made things seem too easy. Perhaps we were playing too nicely and were not ruthless enough to choose the action to send other peoples trains backwards as often as we should have. Compared with previous plays (which were with four players) the game was too tame with three players.

There are plenty of games around building efficient production mechanisms, but very few around the competition to sell things (Automobile and Planet Steam are the other games that springs to mind on this subject - and Gigenten is short and simpler than either).