Going to the games night this week was again a last minute decision, this time because I was recovering from a bad cold. Feeling quite OK and eager to get my Euros back from Matt, as he wasn’t able to bring my pre-ordered copy of Caravelas from Essen, I decided to go. As I entered the room, Nigel said ‘In the Nick of time, Michel…’, because Big Nick had just phoned cancelling his game of Key Market with Susan and David. Fortunately, David had brought along Norenberc, from the designer of Hansa Teutonica. As he explained the rules I thought to myself it would be another dry set collection game, with VPs being awarded for different kinds of sets and majorities. Fortunately I was wrong. Read more… »
Archives for sessions category
This week I had to delay participation in the game’s night to the last minute, due to a parent’s evening. As I arrived I couldn’t believe my eyes: the room was completely packed, with hardly any empty floor space between tables. I had never seen so many of our members together. There were four 4-player games of Seafarers of Catan for this year’s Eurogames tournament, a 3-player game of Agricola, another 4-player game I wasn’t able to see what it was, and Michael, Mark and Graham waiting for me to start a game of Those Pesky Humans! Read more… »
This week David and Susan suggested a game of Genoa, and Richard and I joined them. I had played it only once, in June, and Richard had never played the game, but he got it immediately and beat us thoroughly. He drove hard bargains (must be his patent lawyer training) and managed to accumulate most of the privilege cards, thus getting a massive money bonus at the end. He also played very efficiently, ending without any surplus wares. There were several ‘nasty’ moments throughout the game, for example when Susan finished prematurely her turn, not allowing any of us to take an action. There were also some ‘duh!’ moments, typically provided by yours truly, when I realized I had miscalculated the path of the tower. While I came last in June (605 florins, against 655 for Julie, 665 for Ian, 670 for Ester, and 725 for Julian), this time I miraculously came second, don’t ask me how. I guess it was the large orders I fulfilled, one of them in the game’s and David’s last turn, for which I had to split the order’s proceedings with him. Better 50 florins than nothing…
Genoa seems to be a game that doesn’t get easily repetitive because it gives players so much leeway with respect to trading, strategy and tactics, which in turn means that each play with a different group of people can be quite a different experience.
David and Susan depended on André to take them home and had to wait for him to finish a marathon game of Dominant Species with Big Nick and Michael. So, we next played two rounds of Category 5 (6 nimmt). Meanwhile, other games were finishing, and Mark and Manuela joined us for a game of Vampire. The game’s ‘theme’ is pointless. Suffice to say there are 6 suits of cards, each card being worth 1 or 2 points, and that each player’s goal is to put down a set of at least 3 cards, as valuable as possible, in each suit. Cards cannot be added to sets once they’re formed on the table. At the end of the game, for each suit, whoever has the least valuable set has to discard those cards; all other cards’ points are then added up. During the game there is a face down draw pile, and one face up discard pile per suit. On your turn, you take two cards from the draw pile or you take one complete discard pile. You then either discard a card from your hand or else put down a set of cards. If you take the discard pile of a suit, you must use it to form a set, possibly with additional cards from your hand.
In the first game we were cautious and only formed sets with a reasonable number of points to make sure our own sets would not be the least valuable ones and become worthless at the end. However, it turned out that for each suit there was at least one player who had not formed a set in that suit, which meant that everyone scored the cards in their sets. Since the game ends as soon as the draw pile is exhausted or someone forms a set in each suit, for the second game I tried to make low value sets as fast as possible to force the game’s end before anybody else had accumulated many points. Easier said than done, because it was easy for the others to spot the strategy and try to ‘starve’ me of the suits I still needed, by hoarding them in their hands and then forming sets. Nevertheless, I had a quite better score in the second game, which means the strategy is not too bad. I just have to execute it better next time, maybe by only starting to form sets when I have at least two cards of each suit in my hand. Overall, a nice little filler from Knizia that plays fast and demands some non-trivial choices, but by far not his best game.
I’m not a big fan of cooperative games: my experiences with Shadows over Camelot, A Touch of Evil, Lord of the Rings, and Battlestar Galactica were lukewarm. However, I really enjoyed playing Pandemic with Michael some months ago. The explanation I came up with at the time was that with just two players the engagement was higher. I really felt I was co-responsible for the defeat or victory, whereas with four or more players in the other games I always had the feeling I wasn’t contributing that much to the team, especially with the more experienced players advising the others what to do. I was therefore curious how this week’s game of Pandemic with Damen, Steve and Paul B. would go. Would it be another great experience or a disappointment? Read more… »
No, we didn’t move our games venue to a sauna last week — we played Martin Wallace’s simplified version of his Age of Steam. Keith brought his copy and explained the rules to Damen, Graham, Sam and myself. It was again one of those evenings where I did some of my trademark stupid mistakes, this time right in the first round. While in many other games I would have plenty of time to recover into, say, 3rd position, Steam is absolutely unforgiving and I would remain last throughout the game… Read more… »
Yesterday was double tournament session: Manuela, Ester and Keith played Caylus (in the absence of Paul B.), while Nick Baldyworthy, Dan and I played Stone Age. Interestingly, it was Dan’s first face-to-face game: so far, he only played on BrettSpielWelt. With Nick and Dan having each several games under their belt, and I having only played once before, it was no surprise I lost. Badly. The final score says it all: Read more… »
Last night five of us were due to play Princes of Florence for our Eurogames tournament. Before the holidays, Richard couldn’t come in the last minute; this time it was Paul B. So we decided it was only fair to postpone again. Will we be third time lucky?
Fortunately, many other people had no pre-arranged game and hence there was no lack of choice of which games to play and with whom. In the end, I decided to join Ester, Julian and Pete for a game of Bison, which I had never heard of before. It turned out to be another K&K (Kramer & Kiesling) area control game, with a dash of Knizia and Carcassonne. It was Pete’s game but he couldn’t remember the rules, so we had to endure a painfully slow and confusing rule explanation process, in which Pete half read the rules aloud and half re-explained them. After half an hour we got it (except Julian, who got the basic cost mechanism only half-way through the game). The rules are actually quite clever and put together familiar mechanisms.
For over 2 years I have been wishing to play Goa, an award-winning and highly rated economic development game, in which players take the role of 16th century Portuguese spice merchants trading from Goa, a colony of Portugal from 1510 to 1961. I admit I wasn’t pro-active and just waited for the co-occurrence of three conditions: Steve coming to the club and bringing his copy, and me having no pre-arranged game. The wait for a particular alignment of planets would have been shorter… Well, last week the horoscope must have been favourable to Scorpios because I finally got my chance.
Adding to this the pleasure of seeing Michael join us again after many months of absence (because his live Internet radio show about videogames clashed with our games night) made for a really nice start of the evening.
Steve explained the rules to Paul B., Paul H. and me. Paul H. had a vague recollection he had played the game before (I now checked it was on March 19th). The gist of the game is rather familiar: Read more… »
On March 19th, I played Caylus for the second time. I wasn’t very thrilled about the game after the first play, in October 2007: my memory is of a never-ending and brain-busting game. Maybe I played it too soon, before I had done my proper ‘apprenticeship’ of other, less heavy games. I therefore took the opportunity to give it a second go, hoping I would appreciate it better this time. Indeed, having meanwhile played other action-selection games, like Pillars of the Earth, the game mechanics made much more sense this time, and the game proceeded smoothly and quicker than 2 years before, but Read more… »
Tonight, five of us were due to play a game of Ticket to Ride Europe for the Eurogames tournament the club is organising this year. Richard was unable to come, so Paul B., Julian, David and myself sat around the table. Paul would have liked to have a practice game first, but Julian couldn’t face the psychologically damaging possibility of performing better in practice than in the tournament game, so we went straight for the ‘real thing’. Read more… »
