Friday 22 July 2011

Age of Steam: Korea
My second play of the Korea board. There seemed to be plenty of goods to go around, though the planning is slow due to the need to take into account the changing destination colours as cubes are moved out of cities. Two important points about the Korea expansion are:

• firstly cities have no colour (even New Cities), they are destinations for the cubes they contain,
• secondly New Cities arrive on the board pre-populated with 2 cubes from the Goods Display (which are immediately replaced).

John, Anne and Andrew started around Seoul and that area emptied of cubes almost immediately. Nigel started to the south of the others and I started in Busan (in the south western corner). As John and I joined Nigel, the area south of Seoul also emptied out. Andrew built north and Anne west. The cube shortage was intermittent, until the last turn when most of the board was empty (except one blue and red in each city in the south west - damn US troops).

I led on the share track until I cut back on shares, track building and bidding for turn order (I still had plenty of cubes). I remained on the old 4 link train technology while others had moved onto 5 links (which cost me in the final turn). Nigel issued far fewer shares than anyone else. John and I were neck and neck on the income track but he had fewer shares. On the last turn I lost a point in track due to John's hint to Nigel and another 2 points due to Anne's Urbanisation.

John B   66
Nigel    63
Ian      62
Anne     54
Andrew P 53

Frank's Zoo
We finished the evening with a few hands of Frank's Zoo. Nigel claimed this was the first 4 player game he had played and certainly the number of triples around the table caught some of us by surprise. The hedgehogs loved John.

Nigel   3  9 11 17
Anne   -1  2  9 13
Ian     3  2  4  7
John B  5  7  6  5

First Impressions of Gravediggers, Jaipur, Age of Steam Expansion: Beer & Pretzels and Endeavor (European Powers)

Some thoughts and opinions about some more games I played for the first time in November.

Gravediggers
(Played: 14 & 17 November at home and at Peter's place)
When Anne bought this game I had never heard of it and so I surprised when I looked it up on BGG to see it on my wishlist! It turns out to be a renaming and re-theming of Banküberfall from bank fraud to grave robbing. I had read about the earlier version a few years ago and thought that sounds like fun.

This is a very simple game of memory, bidding, guessing, bluff and greed. Even simpler than High Society. There is a deck of cards, which is mostly money but also characters and multipliers. Everyone starts with a hand of 5 cards and there are 5 graveyards to rob, each starts with a face down card. People add cards to the graveyards during the game and at various points in the game the graveyards are robbed.

Robbing a graveyard consists of everyone secretly bidding an amout of money. The cards are turned up and if any of the cards are people, they take effect in a predetermined order. This sometimes means the grave robbers go home empty handed. But if they are lucky there is some money. Then starting with the players who bid the least, the players are payed out on an all or nothing basis. Be too greedy and you might end up with nothing.

It takes about 2 minutes to learn and about 20 minutes to play. This is fortunate because your action each turn is dictated by turning over the top tile of a small stack of tiles, which removes a lot of decision making. And sometimes when you do have a decision it is not a particularly meaningful one. It pays to regard this as a filler. And maybe replace the Graverdigger card with a pawn or meeple.

Jaipur
(Played: 20 November at home)
Jaipur was my impulse buy, designed by Sébastien Pauchon (who also designed Metropolys, Yspahan and Jamaica). It is a two player card game.

Jaipur, like Yspahan, uses camels as a form of currency. It is a competition between two traders to be the best. The players don't trade directly with each other, but with the same market, which provides most of the tension in the game. Each turn a player either sells cards for points or buys cards. Players "buy" cards in one of three ways. Either they take all the camel cards that are face up in the market and add them to their pile of camel cards (the empty spaces in the market are refilled from the draw deck). Or they take one goods card into their hand from the market and it is replaced from the draw deck. Or they swap 2 or more cards with the market (the cards they take must be goods cards, they cards they put back can be a mixture of goods cards and camel cards). Because both players are buying from the same market any buy action provides opportunities for the opponent. Selling provides tension between speed and quantity. The victory point tokens for sales descend in value so early sales give you more points, but there are also bonus points for selling 3, 4 or 5 goods of a type at once encouraging players to put off selling.

The game is played for the best of three hands (an idea that could be used in Lost Cities as well). Anne won the first game two-nil, winning 78-72 and 65-50. By the time she won the first hand of our second game 78-69, I was considering how much I could make by selling this stupid game on TradeMe. But then I won the next hand 84-74 and it was all on for the final hand.

From a strategy point of view one has to decide which types of goods to concentrate on, whether to go for quick points or to save up and collect sets of 3 or more. These decisions will probably be influenced by what you see your opponents doing. Tactically it is important to watch the hand limit - six is so much more flexible than seven.

Age of Steam: Beer and Pretzels
(Play tested: 21 November at home)
When I read about Ted Alspach's "Beer and Pretzels" variant for Age of Steam I was intrigued. Most game variants change or add rules to games. This one mostly takes rules away. By taking away the share track, income track, expenses and income reduction and by giving money directly for moving goods do you still have a viable game?

Anne and I ran 4 player play-test playing 2 players each, rather than use Ted's official board we used the standard "Rust Belt" Age of Steam board.

On the "Rust Belt" board it becomes too easy to make money and there is not enough money in Age of Steam to pay everyone. Ted's official Beer & Pretzels board includes several mountain ranges and a number of rivers. Many of the cities are quite a long way apart. Overall it looks like a more expensive map to build on than "Rust Belt". Anne also mentioned that perhaps we didn't compete enough with each other in the auctions.

My conclusion is: yes this is a viable (and simpler) game. Though you need a more expensive board to consume excess cash. Playing this on the “Rust Belt” board at $5 per cube per link is too easy. It may be worth considering shortening the game by a turn or two.

Endeavor (European Powers)
(Play tested: 24 November at Peter's)
Jarratt brought along an Endeavor play test board which I have called "European Powers" for want of a better name.

It is a substantial redesign of the board plus some extra rules, but the cards, tokens, buildings and other pieces are the same as the original game.

Europe is represented by five main colonizing powers (Portugal, Spain, France, England and the Netherlands). Each Power has a couple of city spaces. Before the game starts each player places a piece in one of these Power cities that no-one else has chosen. Each Power has special advantages. France has defensive advantages (attacking French tokens in Europe costs an extra piece). The Netherlands gets access to special shipping spots that function more like cities. There are no normal shipping routes for the Americas. Each of the 3 America card decks are open to specific European Powers.

The shipping routes to Africa, India etc cross region boundaries with pieces counting for influence depending on which side of the boundary they are (which makes the building that allows a joint shipping and colonizing action to be more useful). Some places have multiple routes and some routes only become available once other regions have opened up. The Slave deck has been moved to Africa.

The changes add a bit more complexity to Endeavor, and make it seem less abstract and more historic.

I tried to get as many cities as possible. Though Jarratt managed to almost eliminate me from Europe. I enjoyed it more than previous plays of the standard game.

Age of Steam India (7 August 2010)

Jarratt organized games are our place on Saturday.

Masters Gallery
Jarratt was expecting Nigel to show up, so we played this while we waited. The second and third rounds finished very quick, hence low score, Jarratt and Travis were going neck and neck. But Travis made out like a bandit in the last round.

Travis   7 18 39 84
Jarratt 12 19 40 70
Anne     7 18 32 68
John B  15 20 34 65
Ian      6 14 33 60

Age of Steam Expansion: India
The points of difference for this expansion include a single black city, once you deliver black cubes you keep them. You can either expend two black cubes for an income point or keep to the end for 3 VP each. There are no new cities and $15 sea links that are one link but two income points for cubes delivered over them. This was the second time that Jarratt, Anne and I had played this board, while the first time for John and Travis.

I started in the north west between Srinagar and Delhi via Amritsar and delivered two cubes for four income, but things went down hill after that. Jarratt started between Jodhpur and Porbandar, next door to me. While John built between Bhopal and Varanasi, hemming me in to the south. Anne started in the north eastern corner of the board and Travis had the south to himself.

John got himself into trouble and I bailed him out because if I let him go under Jarratt would have benefited too much. That put Jarratt into the lead. I later made a deal with John that I regretted as he did better out of out of it than I did. I split my network and missed a good black cube move. On the other side of the board Anne's plan to deliver yellow cubes for six was falling apart as we were blocking her out of all the yellow cities. Travis lagging behind in income but also in shares.

In the north west we were running out of cubes. Travis built one of the $15 sea links and was delivering black cubes over one of Anne's links, he over took John and Jarratt (once you took his lack of shares into consideration). They had used all their shares by the end of the game.

Travis  81
Jarratt 75
John B  74
Ian     71
Anne    55

It took a long time, but I enjoyed it more than the first time I played. I now have to learn to resist temptation and start in the south.

Overall it was Travis's evening.