The Game

In Norenberc, there are various guilds (bakers, paper makers, etc.), their craftsmen and the corresponding goods (bread, paper, etc.).  The goal is to hire the best craftsmen of each guild and to gather crests (from the guilds and special ones). By the end of the game VPs are awarded for various conditions. For example, each craftsman is worth a certain number and for each guild the player with the highest sum gets 5VP (2nd placed 3VP, 3rd placed 1V). Additionally, each player gets VPs for the number of different crests they have. There are also special professionals who give bonuses at the end of the game (e.g. extra VP or an extra crest) or immediately (e.g. the thief allows to steal goods from another player).

Goods are needed to hire people and money is needed to buy goods. Money can be obtained by selling goods or hiring people late: you get one coin for each action that has been taken previously in that round in the guildhall from which you’re hiring. And how are actions recorded? By using the usual worker placement mechanism. Each player starts with 4 workers and then all players decide secretly in which guildhalls they will enact their workers (to buy or sell products or hire people). Some people, when hired, allow a player to immediately get an extra worker. The worker stays until the end of the round in the guildhall where it was used and this enables one to quickly see how much income a hiring will generate, namely the number of workers present.

A second kind of majority control is needed to obtain guild crests:  at the end of each round, whoever has the majority of goods of a guild receives the corresponding crest, and also one craftsman. There are only as many rounds as there are guilds (4 in a 3-player game), hence only a few chances to get a guild’s crest. Getting multiple crests of the same guild doesn’t bring any extra VPs. In other words, you should on average get a different guild crest each round or else you’ll lose VPs badly, i.e. you should diversify in each round the majority of goods you hold. Furthermore, in each round a person becomes cheaper to hire (one less good required), finally being ‘evicted’ from the guildhall after some rounds, a mechanism similar to St. Petersburg.

The Review

By now you must have the same the same feeling I had as the game was explained to me: this is all very deja vu, a mixture of familiar mechanisms, the old boring ‘place workers to transform money into resources and transform resources into something else that will give VPs’ kind of game. I was fearing it would drag on like Caylus, or be a bad pot-pourri like Endeavour, two games I don’t particularly enjoy.  However, I quite liked Noremberc. Why?

First, it’s not a very long game, even for slow thinkers like me, because there are only a handful of rounds, in each round you only take as many actions as the workers you have, and for each action you have only 3 options (buy, sell, hire). All this provides enough challenge (go to the right guildhalls in the right order, time your hirings, watch what the others are doing to avoid fighting for the same majority in each round, etc.) but is not too complex to get into analysis-paralysis mode. Of course, there were still times where I held up the game (but Susan and David were too polite to point that out, contrary to some other more bantering-prone club members), especially when the craftsman or good I wanted had just been acquired by the previous player. It requires thinking on your feet to get a viable Plan B quickly, something I struggle with.

Second, the various mechanisms work well together and it all makes sense for the theme: building a powerhouse of craftsmen from all guilds. Of course, you have to take ‘makes sense’ with a large pinch of salt, it’s a German Eurogame after all. For example, I wish in real life you could hire bakers for a loaf of bread. But overall, it’s a tightly knit game, with some counter-balancing mechanisms. For example, whoever has the majority of a good, and gets the corresponding crest at the end of a round, must return one of those goods to the guildhall, thus making it more difficult for someone to hold on to their goods majority for several rounds. Nevertheless, David managed to do exactly that: he had the boots majority in the first 3 rounds. Susan got it in the last round through a precisely timed hiring of the thief, which enabled her to snatch 2 boots from David and turn the tables around.

Third, the game is tense throughout, but with a peak at the end, like all good games: whoever has the majority of a good in the last round, gains two instead of one craftsmen of the corresponding guild, which can completely change who gets the 5VP for the best craftsmen in that guild. The tension comes from the scarcity of goods and money (leading to weary fights for majority) and from having to make simultaneous decisions on where to place workers (leading to quick tactical changes when different players choose the same guildhall). Despite being very tactical, one can outline some strategies at the beginning of each round, based on the distribution of goods among the players and guildhalls and the people available for hiring. One key strategy is to try to obtain extra workers as fast as possible. I was lucky that many of the special professionals that provide extra workers came out in the first round and I could grab them  largely unchallenged by Susan and David. By the second round I had 7 actions per round, which came very handy to buy more goods, hire more craftsmen, and ultimately win the game (with 39VP, against David’s 31 and Susan’s 29), in spite of practically running out of money and goods (and hence options) in the last round. But due to the extra workers, I could first hire a craftsman and get extra money, and then spend it on the loafs necessary to get the bread majority. This gave me two crests and two extra bakers, and hence several VPs. The photo shows my final situation.

Overall, a challenging but not too complex game that cleverly and smoothly combines some familiar mechanisms into a swift gameplay. I dare say that it can satisfy both those who’d like a medium weight economic game and those who’d like an introduction to the worker placement and the economic resource management types of games. I certainly look forward to playing again this game and, after also enjoying Hansa Teutonica, I’m piqued to try further games by Andreas Steding.

The Dessert

We then played Cartagena (David brought the beautiful 2010 reprint), one of my most played and favourite games (see ‘Games I like’ on the sidebar). David was kind enough to move ahead and occupy several places with the same symbol, making it easy for me to use the cards I accumulated throughout the game to move my pirates from well behind quickly into the boat.

This was one of my shortest game nights ever (I left before 10pm), but it was highly enjoyable, with one new game and an old familiar one, both very good in their own genres.

Michael, the game’s owner, explained us the rules, which are fairly simple. One player (Michael in this case) plays the monster lord and its minions, while each of the other players takes the role of a human: Mark was the brave knight in shining armour, Graham was the attractive female thief, and I was the old hapless wizard. The game is played on a board depicting a dungeon, the monsters aiming to kill the humans before they find three treasures — aah, the good ol’ universal themes of greed and survival. Each character (human or not) can move a certain number of hexagons per turn, and has a certain number of attack and defense points. Whenever two characters are adjacent, they can battle: the attacker throws a die, adds it to the character’s attack points, and the total is compared against the defender’s die throw plus defense points. If the attacker wins, the defender takes one hit. Each character can take a certain number of hits before it’s dead. Moreover, there are cards that give extra defence or attack capabilities, recover from hits taken, bring new minions on the board, etc.

As one can see, the game is neither original nor complex, but it’s good fun. As the cover image indicates, the game doesn’t take itself too seriously, poking fun at the usual Dungeons&Dragons-style conventions. The illustrations and text on the cards are quite funny, and whacking Goblins, Orcs & Co. is always a good pastime. Nevertheless, the game is quite challenging: it’s very hard for three humans to defeat all those monsters that just won’t stop coming into the dungeon. Our valiant knight bravely took many monsters on his own and was the first to bite the dust. Graham had to leave and so Mark took on the thief role but by then we were surrounded by monsters and it was a matter of rounds until it was over. At least we earned the ‘pesky’ adjective and  dispatched several monsters into oblivion. On hindsight, we should have moved more quickly at the beginning, to collect all special defence and attack bonuses before battling the monsters, and we shouldn’t have spent so many of our cards so soon. Oh well, there’s always a ‘next time…’.

We then played another game Michael brought, the pompously named Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer, which is basically a Dominion-style game, with three types of cards: monsters, heroes and constructs. Each hero and construct card costs a certain number of runes to acquire, and provides zero or more strength points, which are required to defeat monsters. Each defeated monster brings the player a certain amount of victory points. Construct cards, once played from the hand, remain on the table and hence in effect every turn.

The image shows one of the constructs I had: it cost me 4 runes to acquire (upper right corner), it brought me two VPs at the end of the game (lower left corner), and it gave me every turn one strength point and the ability to acquire 3 VPs for 4 runes. A very handy card that I often used whenever I had not enough strength points to defeat a monster that would bring me more than 3 VPs. This was possibly the card that enabled me to win the game with 64 VPs, against Mark’s 53 and Michael’s 50 VPs. I suppose the sentence at the bottom of each card is just to make us feel all ‘kung-fuey and mystical’, in the words of Po, the kung-fu panda.

Ascension is a rather easy game: use all the runes and strength points that you have in your hand and table cards to defeat monsters and acquire further cards; put all those cards into your discard pile; take another 5 cards from your draw pile for your next turn; if your draw pile is exhausted, take the discard pile and shuffle it; repeat ad nauseam, as in Dominion.

There are three major differences with respect to Dominion. First, VPs are kept separate from the cards’ abilities, which means that obtaining VPs doesn’t weaken your deck. Second, there is only a limited choice of cards that can be acquired or defeated at any time, each card taken being immediately replaced from a shuffled draw pile, while in Dominion all cards are known and available from the start. Third, there is no limitation on the actions that can be taken in each turn: just look at the available heroes, constructs and monsters and try to spend all the runes and strength points you have on them. This makes Ascension a very light game with hardly any tactics or strategy as far as I could see. Add to this a useless board, an irrelevant ‘theme’, an even more automatic game play than Dominion because there are few tough choices, and you know I’ll try to avoid playing this again. Sorry, Michael.

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.

Damen and Steve had never played before and I had forgotten the rules, so Paul went through them and was the lead adviser in the first game, which we lost because we let the black virus cubes run out, a condition Paul had forgotten to explain. He therefore made a rather pathetic attempt to amend things by backtracking the last turn, but Damen (of all people) asked repeatedly in the most meek tone: ‘But isn’t that cheating?’ Paul finally saw it was pointless to undo one or even two turns and we started a new game.

We learned from our mistakes, and we started to be more confident in our discussions, proposing actions and tactics ourselves instead of mostly agreeing with Paul. Also, contrary to the first game, we now had a medic in the team. We became more efficient, using better our roles’ abilities. For example, we often passed cards to the scientist (Paul), so that he could find cures quickly for the medic (me) to then just go through the cities and treat the infected populations without consuming precious actions. Nevertheless, the game was no walk in the park and we won just before the black cubes were going to run out again.

My games with Michael had been similar: we lost the first game and won the second one in the nick of time, in the last round before using up the deck of cards. So why do I get much more pleasure from Pandemic than the other cooperative games?

• Pandemic is about our planet, not some sci-fi (Battlestar Galactica) or fantasy world (Lord of the Rings). It’s in the present, not some mythological past (Shadows over Camelot). As the population information on the city cards reminds us, we’re saving millions of people in the great and beautiful cities of the world (Paris, London, NY, etc.), not a handful of villagers I couldn’t care less about (A Touch of Evil). We’re even saving Essen and thereby the whole gaming world from extinction, for crying out loud! Last but not least, we take the roles of real people, not of small creatures with furry feet (LotR). Pandemic is full of theme and it all adds to the engagement with the game.

• Damen’s first question to Paul was predictably: ‘Are there traitors in this game?’ No there aren’t, it’s a purely cooperative game, which means you don’t have any second thoughts on whether an action will benefit more the traitor than the rest of the team. It’s all for one, and one for all, which further adds to the engagement of each player in the outcome.

• Tension builds up fast and remains throughout the game. After just a few turns (never mind rounds!) those virus cubes are multiplying like rabbits on the board, especially due to the domino-like epidemics, and you have to be constantly on the watch. A couple of distractions or wasteful and non-cooperative actions, and game over. In the other cooperative games I tried, it takes much longer for you to be in the thick of it.

• Rules are simple and play is fast, making for short games and a high replaying factor.

To sum up, Pandemic is definitely going to stay on my ‘want to play’ list for a while. However, I understand it’s not to everyone’s taste and Damen said so after our second game.

We thus proceeded to more traditional fare. I missed last week’s gaming night because I was at a conference in Porto, Portugal, so it seemed fit to bring along El Capitán and its Porto expansion. Damen and Steve had played with me long time ago, Paul never, so I went through the rules. Adding to this the usual length of the game (ca. 1h30), it was clear we wouldn’t have enough time after two games of Pandemic: we managed to play only two of El Capitán‘s three phases. It’s always unsatisfying to not finish a game, especially when it’s a well constructed majority control game by Wolfgang Kramer with an increasingly tense narrative arc.

As such, the many changes of warehouse majorities in the last phase did not occur. Still, we had some fights for majority control in the various cities, the most disputed one being Marseille, which brings in many florins for the majority owner. Paul cleverly built there a fortress (to gain the same amount of money as the warehouse majority winner) and left the rest of us spending precious turns in building warehouses there. We fought bitterly for majority, but Kramer’s game is full of counter-balancing mechanisms: the more warehouses in a city, the less the majority is worth. Hence, Marseille brought in only a fraction of the florins it could. Fortunately, I had a backup plan and started in the first phase an expansion strategy, because the more cities you have warehouses in, the more money you get at the end of a phase, but (again the negative feedback loop) by spreading thin you hardly will have the majority in any city. I completed this strategy in the second phase and was able  to collect the 15 florin bonus for being the first (and only one) to have warehouses in 9 cities. Moreover, I took only one loan in the second phase while everyone else took two, which meant more net profit for me, enough to beat Paul.

The game ended with Steve having 46 florins, Damen 56, Paul 95 and me 111. However, that included the 15 end-of-game bonus that I would not have available as cash for the third phase. I thus wonder how the game would end if we had completed it… El Capitán remains a favourite of mine due to its finely balanced mechanics, gorgeous artwork, and twist-and-turn tension until the final moments.

The game is about building rail tracks between cities and transporting goods between them. At the start of each round, players can get income by selling shares of their company for $5 each. Each player chooses how many shares they wish to sell. Next, players bid for the turn order and thereby spend part of their money. Then, in turn order, each player chooses one privilege, like being the first to build track or transport goods, independently of turn order. Following that, players take turns to build track between cities and pay according to the terrain and other factors. Finally, players take turns to do 2 actions, which can be to increase the reach of our locomotive or to transport one good (a coloured cube) to a like-coloured city. Each segment of track between two cities used to transport the good brings in 1 VP (or 1 share, at their choice) for the owner of that segment. The reach of the locomotive imposes the limit of segments used, i.e. the maximum of VPs/shares earned by transporting the good. The round ends with each player paying $1 for each reach level of their locomotive, and $1 per share they don’t own (i.e. if it is held by investors). If they played well and own shares, they get $1 per share.

All players start with no money, no shares, and their locomotive only traverses one segment. A typical first round will hence go like this: sell two shares to investors for $10, spend $4 or less in the bidding round to get in a reasonable turn position, get the privilege to build or ship first, spend $4 to build a 2-track segment, ship two goods between the two cities to get back the two shares you sold. This means you’re back to zero shares owned, you only pay $1 for the loco, and keep $1 after the first round.

If you don’t have enough cash to pay for the loco and to the investors, you have to sell extra shares for just $2 each, meaning you will owe even more money in the next round. You will basically have to always pass when bidding for turn order to keep the money for buying track and making further connections. This in turn means you always have last choice of privileges, go last in building track and hence don’t get the cheapest routes, etc. etc. Recovering from debt will take many rounds, as in real life

Now guess what? Everyone picked up the gist of the game, as I explained above, except me. Although Keith had warned that money was tight, I was stupid enough to just raise $10 in shares and pay $6 for going first! Did I pick up the best privilege? No, I picked the one that allowed me to build in first place! Did I then built the track segment in such a way that blocked others from connecting the same cities? No, I allowed Graham to build track parallel to mine!  With such stupid mistakes, I finished the round lacking cash and having to sell extra shares. Most of the rest of the game was just making ends meet in order to never have to sell extra shares again. I succeeded and in the last rounds I managed to make some VPs, but by then it was too late for any recovery. Another mistake was to upgrade the loco too late and too little: by the end of the game, I could only earn at most 3 VPs/shares per turn, while the others were raking in 4+ VPs/shares per turn during most of the game.

Damen won the game by smartly taking the urbanization privilege often, which allows one to put a new city and 3 cubes on the map. There are several city ‘placeholders’ within short distance in the east of the map, and Damen quickly connected them, thereby getting several end-of-game VPs (1 per segment) in a cheap way. Not to mention he got to pick the cubes that could be best transported between the cities. Keith came second by expanding alone in the northwest corner, setting up a circular line  between cities of different colours, so that he could always send any good the longest way. Sam struggled a bit during the first half of the game, but picked up nicely in the second half. Graham did well in the first half, but in the second one it became apparent that him and I occupying the same south/south-western corner was damaging both, as we were transporting between the same cities and hence depleting the goods supply doubly fast. Final score: Damen had 36VP, Keith 35, Graham 25, Sam 21 and I had a pathetic 10VP. It goes largely without saying that Damen provided lost of generous unsolicited advice during the game, although not always quite in our best interest.

Final impressions: a great game, but definitely with a snowball effect, both ways. If you do a mistake, you get into even more trouble and you’re just fighting for survival most of the game. If you do well early, you’re on a roll. For example, Keith was impressed Damen got so early into owning more than zero shares. I must play this again and show I’ve learned something (the hard way), like studying well the map and placement of cubes before the first bid, taking $15 in the first round, and upgrading the loco in sync with the length of the built path in order to maximize the VPs/shares per turn. The game should become more balanced if all players are experienced.

If you wish to know more details about the game’s strategy, I recommend Graham’s detailed and largely accurate report. He only forgot that he (not me) was the first copy-cat, by putting his track next to mine between the same cities in the first round. Playing 2nd and with $11 to spend, he had plenty of other choices.

At the other tables, loads of games were played. Nigel needed the whole evening to beat David, Steve and Big Nick at a game of Brass. It took much less time for Paul B. to win the Tigris & Euphrates tournament game against Chris and André. They next played Coloretto and Sequence, and Paul won both! Chris left, Paul and André played Lost Cities… and Paul won! Paul was definitely on a roll. I can’t remember any of us winning 4 games in a single night. Well done, Paul! At another table, Paul H., John, Dan, Manuela and Michael played Citadels and Heckmeck am Bratwurmeck, while Ester, Julian, Matt and Ben played Reef Encounter followed by Stone Age.

I increased my tribe to 6 members early on, and then never increased it until the game’s end, while Nick and Dan started to grow their populations later and finished with over 8 people each, allowing them to get more resources each turn. In particular, they acquired many more cards than I, climbing up the food production chart and obtaining extra VP bonuses at the end, with Nick obviously choosing his cards more wisely than Dan. I should kick myself, because Paul had told me before hand that Nick would amass cards, and I didn’t do anything to prevent it. Only in the last round did I take a population multiplier, which gave me 6 VP and prevented them of getting 8+ VP. Without that action, I would have trailed even further behind. After about 90min (including a rule refresher for my benefit) the best player won and the most inexperienced and stupid one lost: fair’s fair. My consolation is that Nigel told me later that he and Matt had also been heavily beaten by Nick when they played together.

André and Michael, who had been rather lonely playing with my copy of Hey, that’s my fish!, joined us for a game of Endeavor, the new rage at the club. Dan was the only one who had played it before and went rather quickly through the rules; it took us two turns to get a grasp of them, with several minor points being asked throughout the game. Basically, it’s yet another economic development game, but with some topological and area majority elements. It’s not a bad game, but it’s too abstract – the way you pick up capabilities from the sea and from cards doesn’t make any thematic sense, for example. The game is too self conscious, i.e. it makes its design too obvious, with a potpourri of various mechanics brought together for no particular reason. Great design, not just in games, should be elegant and self-effacing. To sum up: it’s a game that lacks character, IMHO. For me, Puerto Rico still rules.

Nick obviously has a knack for these games, because he won again, with 66 VP, followed by André (56), myself (55), Michael (52) and Dan (43). We played the game rather quickly for first-timers: about 90min including rule explanations. At the other tables, John, Matt, Graham and Julian played Endeavour followed by Yspahan (twice?), while Nigel brought his copy of Struggle of Empires and played with Damen, Sam, Big Nick, Ian and someone else I can’t recall. They didn’t finish the game, and will continue next week. As for me, after Goa, San Juan, Stone Age and Endeavor, I definitely need a break from this type of games: they’re all challenging and tense, but too much of the same is not a healthy diet…

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.

The game is played in 4 rounds, with each player having 4 actions per round, from a choice of 6 possible ones. One of the actions has to be laying a tile drawn randomly at the start of each round. Each tile has three areas (prairie and mountain, separated by a river), with zero or more animals (salmon, bison and turkey) on each area. As the tiles are laid, the areas get connected, and whoever controls a contiguous area, gets at the end of the round as many animals (i.e. food) as shown in that area. The player with the second-highest control gets only half the food, and all other players present in the same area get as many food as shown on the tiles they stand on. Control of an area is basically obtained by having the biggest tepee (or canoe in case of a river) and/or most meeples (cubes, actually). The other possible actions are putting meeples on the board, moving them around, and building tepees and canoes. Each player only has 7 meeples (like Carcassonne), and meeples only get on the board if they’re put on the just laid tile (like Carcassonne). To get meeples back into your hand to settle them elsewhere, you have to replace them by tepees or canoes. All actions cost food (e.g. the biggest tepee costs 4 of each animal kind!), and you can only build at most one tepee and one canoe per round, and there are only 4 rounds.

You get the idea: it’s a very tight game, where every action counts and food is never enough to do want you would like to. The cherry on the cake is the Knizia touch in the final scoring mechanism. The score is the least number of animals of the same kind you get at the end of the last round. For example, if the area control you achieved by the end of the last round awards you 10 bison, 7 salmon and 3 turkey, your score is 3.  It’s therefore a game where you have to diversify, instead of wasting resources to get the control of one or two very big areas. Being second in an area is often just as well. However, without controlling at least one area, you don’t get enough food for all the expensive actions.  Of course, we only realised all these finer tactic details at the end of the game, by which time it was too late: Pete (the only one who had played it before) won with a score of 6, followed by Julian (5), me (4) and Ester (3). The final scores show well how tight the game is.

To sum up, a rather abstract and slow game. It took us nearly 2 hours, not including rule explanation, for the 64 actions (= 4 rounds x 4 actions x 4 players), due to the downtime to compute mentally the gain of each action. However, the game has a very nice build up of tension. I’ll gladly play it again.

With still one hour until closing time, we decided to play San Juan. I was the only one who never played it before. Pete quickly got me through the rules — this time he knew them by heart . I played miserably, wasting money on the wrong buildings at the wrong time. I built an expensive triumphal arch, which gives extra VPs for each monument built, but I had no mounuments. I built a chapel rather early, which allows to add one card per round for an extra VP each, but seldom had enough cards in my hand to spare one for the chapel. I built a tower, which allows to keep 12 instead of 7 cards in your hand at the end of each round, but never came close to the 7, let alone the 12 card limit. With such pathetic decisions, it’s no surprise I came last, with ridiculous 17 VP. The others chose their buildings wisely, getting e.g. extra cards when producing and selling goods, enabling them to keep a smooth ‘production engine’, with always enough cards in their hand. Ester had a palace (which gives a 25% VP bonus) and a tower and monument, achieving 20 VP. Julian built a chapel later than me but added 5 cards to it and also had a further VP bonus, for a final score of 23. Finally, Pete, like me, had no VP bonuses at all, but was the first to achieve the 12 buildings needed to finish the game. He built 4 (!) silver smelters, which kept his income going throughout the game. Just the buildings got him a whopping 34 VP!

I now realise why I lost: San Juan is the Dominion version of Puerto Rico! The first (and only) time I played Dominion, I also came last with a pitiful score. I guess my brain blocks in these fast-paced games (at least there is the pressure for me not to think my usual 5 minutes…). I definitely must practice them more often to get a bit more agile.

As for what else happened, it was again full house, with the tables filling the whole room. André, the two Nicks, Keith and Chris played Imperial; Matt, John, Dan, Graham and David played Endeavor followed by El Grande; Manuela, Richard, Michael, and Paul H. played Mission: Red Planet followed by Fische Fluppen Frikadellen; Nigel and Damen played Twilight Struggle, while Sam and Ian played Combat Commander. Definitely a variety of good games!

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: you bid for resources which will help develop your capacity to produce further resources (build ships, collect taxes, harvest spices, make settlements). At the end of the game, whoever further developed their overall capacities wins the game. The game lasts 8 rounds, each with an auction phase followed by an action phase. In the auction phase, each player selects a face up tile for auction, which the other players bid on. The player who selected the tile either accepts the highest bid (and takes the money from the other player, who gets the tile) or outbids it to get the tile himself, and pays to the bank. Tiles represent resources (or special actions, in the last 4 rounds) that are used in the action phase of each round to develop the capacities. The game has an original tile selection mechanism in which the grid layout of tiles is used to constrain what tile the next player can select. There is also an element of making settlements and plantations to harvest spices, and there are  adventure cards and special tiles, which allow other ways of getting VPs. As you can see, a rather classic German economic development game (from 2004), in the footsteps of Puerto Rico (2002), Princes of Florence (2000) and the like. I’m never fond of those special/bonus cards/tiles in games: they are purely for game mechanic purposes, making the theme so much thinner. I hence didn’t enjoy Goa as much as I expected, because being a game related to Portugal, I was really looking forward to a strong theme. On hindsight I was being naive: knowing other German designer games, I should have been more moderate in my expectations. It’s nevertheless a good game, where it’s not easy to value a tile you’re bidding on, and where you can visually track the development of your capacities and hence get a sense of achievement throughout the game. I’m looking forward to see how the 2010 edition will look like and what rules will change. Hopefully, the new edition will also lower the price for used copies of the out-of-print original edition . In either edition, Goa has to join Santiago, Magellan, and Age of Discovery in my collection of games related to Portugal.

As for our game, in an early round (2nd or 3rd, I think), Steve selected a tile that gave its owner 4 ducats per round. One of the Pauls bid 7 ducats for it, I bid 15. All bids so far in the game had been rather cautious and hence my offer raised a stir. Steve needed the money and accepted my bid. (Paul B. asked me to write that I ‘severely overpaid’ to Steve.) For the rest of the game, asking ‘Do I hear a bid of 15?’ or similar became a recurrent catchphrase. My lucky break came in the last round, when I selected a swap tile for auction. It’s a powerful special tile that allows its owner to swap it during the action phase for any of the tiles remaining on the board. Steve bid some pitiful amount (or passed, can’t remember), Paul B. bid 8 ducats, Paul H. 20. He couldn’t have known that 9 ducats would have been enough, because I had 8 ducats myself and hence couldn’t outbid them.  Steve selected the next tile, which allowed to harvest spices. With the just earned money, I got it for 13 ducats and filled my empty plantations.In the ensuing action phase, my first action was to harvest spices: I had already enough, so I used a special adventure card in my hand to get instead any combination of colonists, ships and spices. I took 7 ships and 1 spice. With plenty of ships and spices, in the 2nd and 3rd actions I spent some to develop my two lowest capacities to the 3rd level, hence getting an extra action, which I used with the remaining ships and spices to develop another capacity to 4th (and highest) level. The last round definitely brought me a lot of VP. Moreover, I was the only one who had made 4 settlements, for another 10VP. Result: I not only had my cake (i.e. got to play Goa), I also ate it too – I won the game with 40 VP. What else can one ask for for a perfect  games night? It wasn’t easy though: Paul H. came a very close 2nd with 39 VP (uff!), Steve had 37 and Paul B. 28 VP.

At another table, Nick Baldyworth won a Puerto Rico tournament game against Chris (1 VP behind), Keith and Richard, while Damen and Matt played Dominion. Then Matt and Nick swapped places: Nick and Damen played Magic the Gathering while the others had a game of Ra.  Ester, Julian, Dan and John played Le Havre all evening long, and André, Graham, David and Michael played El Grande followed by Puerto Rico.

It’s the kind of game where you derive some masochistic pleasure from having to take tough choices and sadistic pleasure from seeing your opponents wrench under the choice of the least bad option. (In that respect, I give plenty of pleasure to others: this time, I must have taken almost 5 minutes to decide upon one of my actions. I can’t remember Matt’s and Chris’ comments, but I’m sure they were supportive… I have in my notes that Matt often tried to start playing when it was actually my turn, which may have been his sub-conscious way to tell me I should hurry up.) Back to the kind of game: since I’m not a masochist, I prefer shorter and less heavy games, like In the Year of the Dragon. From what I read elsewhere, these long economic development games should give us players the sense of having actually achieved something after a long and arduous struggle against all odds. Somehow, I didn’t get that feeling in Caylus but I do in Year of the Dragon. Maybe because in the latter we have the palaces and workers right in front of us, and see them grow and shrink, whereas in Caylus our buildings, workers, and contributions to the castle are spread all over the board. I also noted that we often made mistakes regarding the colours. I’m starting to wonder what is the impact of the physical manipulation and layout of resources during a game on the immersion of players in the game’s world.

Well, enough philosophizing. In the end, Matt produced the most gold and won with 57 points. Next, Chris with 52 points, me with 47, Keith with 42 (and the most prestigious buildings) and Ester with 38.

Next I played Cartagena, with David, Big Nick and Huggy, who won. At the start of the game he was attempting to do 4 actions in a row. As with Matt before, we must always watch what these absent-minded players do…

At the other tables, Steve brought Goa and played it with Paul H. and Sam, David brought Katana and played with Ricahrd, Damen, Huggy and Julian, and Jackson brought Sumeria and played it with André, Manuela and Big Nick.

My initial tickets were not great and after some typical deep slow thinking on my part (read: indecision), I settled for Copenhagen-Erzurum and Vilnius-Athens routes, seeing I could cover both with a long track. As the game went on, I had not much trouble in doing the two tickets, except for Paul forcing me to take an extra 4-train detour, and for a 4-train tunnel costing me two extra engines (ouch!). I despaired when Julian attempted the 4-train orange tunnel that I needed to go from Athens to Erzurum: not another detour! Fortunately, he wasn’t able to match the two extra cards coming up in the draw and in my next turn I attempted the same: luckily, I had to match only one extra card. Uff! If two had come up, I would also have to forfeit the attempt.

Paul was following his usual strategy of amassing huge amounts of cards. He was also taking lots of cards from the top of the deck. At some point David wondered why so few engines were appearing…. Paul managed to do the 8-train tunnel in North Europe, landing him a whopping 21 points. David was initially a bit all over the place, with disjoint tracks in East, Central and South-West Europe. Julian had a similar pattern, but in East and South Europe. Both built some medium-length tracks. Result: during almost the whole game, I was trailing behind in the point count.

It looked like I was going to get the 10-point bonus for longest track, with 30 trains connecting Copenhagen to Erzurum via Athens, but Paul had his eyes on the bonus too and with his big hand of cards had no major problem in surpassing me. I extended my route with a 3-train track to get back in the lead, but Paul got the upper hand again. Bummer!

Everybody else had kept 3 or 4 tickets from the start and never obtained new ones. I was wary I’d get some bad routes again, but nevertheless tried my luck. I picked up a Frankfurt-Copenhagen and a Frankfurt-Smolensk route. I just needed two green cards for the former (which I had) and to place a station for the latter. Great!

Paul triggered the final round, in which I placed the Smolensk station, thereby accomplishing all my 4 tickets, for 50 points. But the coup was David managing to do in his final turn a 6-train tunnel that accomplished his Lisbon-Moscow ticket and gave him the longest route! Paul was utterly dismayed, especially because he had neglected two tickets in order to attempt the longest route.

Final score: David won his second tournament game with 132 VP, Paul had 77, Julian 104 and I 111. David used no stations, everyone else used one.

At another table, Nigel, André and Nick Baldyworth (not to be confused with the children book author Nick Butterworth) played Stone Age. I had brought the 6 hut tiles from spielbox and promptly forgot to tell them I had it. Duh! Matt and Ester played Royal Palace, with some gentle bantering going on between Julian and Ester, while Steve, Keith and Graham managed to get a game of Princes of Florence in about one hour. Keith and Julian then joined Matt and Ester for a game of Cuba, while Graham and Steve joined us for Modern Art.

We had lots of laughs as we tried to entice the interest of others on our offerings and paintings were auctioned for ridiculously high or low prices. A prime example of the latter was David and I selling two Karl Gitter paintings to Steve in the 4th and last round for respectively $1k and $3k! David and I were really desperate, with no good cards and everyone outbidding us in the last round. While David did well in the first round, I did well in the 3rd round, and Graham did regularly well, the last round was mainly a Steve & Paul affair: each one acquired 5+ paintings, with Paul having first choice on the fixed-price offerings of Steve.  I acquired no painting in the last round; David bought two Lite Metal paintings, hoping to bank on the score accumulated in previous rounds, but they turned out to be worthless; Graham managed to sell several paintings for a good price. Final wealth:  Paul $535k, Graham $408k, me $350k, Steve $328k, David $225.

Two great games in one evening, with big twists in the last round. Well designed games are a bit like good plays, providing comedy and drama for over one hour. But of course, much of the entertainment depends on having good actors, and my ‘thespian colleagues’ at the club never fail to raise to the occasion.