Alexander Der Grosse (Die Siedler von Catan scenario) (10th)
Ave Caesar (17th)
Liars' Dice (3rd)
Lost Cities (10th)
Mamma Mia (24th)
Manhattan (17th)
Outpost (3rd)
Ricochet Robot (10th)
Smuggle (3rd)
Tikal (17th & 24th)
Till Eulenspiegel (10th)
Und Tschüss (17th)
Zirkus Flohcati (24th)
School was still out, so I took Alex and Dan, joining Ben to give us nine, including Glen Hodgson, who had come along to give the club, and German style games, a try. Hopefully he had a good time and will get along again for further sessions.
Glen and I formed one group with the children while the others played Outpost. This is not a game I know anything about, other than it gets played postally and doesn't seem to be 'family' game material. I'm sure that Mick would be the first to say it's a game of skill. Result: MH, SG, SO, CD.
Meantime, the rest of us warmed up with a couple of games of Liar's Dice. It was also a good game to get Glen started on. He obviously picked up the idea quickly after doing badly in the first game, because he won the second one. Result 1: TC, BH, AH, DH, GH. Result 2 : GH, AH, BH, TC, DH.
Having warmed up, we went on to play Smuggle, a more recent version of an old game called Contraband, I believe. Each person gets to play the customs officer as the other players pay duty on goods they declare from cards they are holding - or else they lie. The customs officer has to accept the offered cash or ask to see the 'luggage' (cards) of the player - with penalties for a wrongful accusation. As a fair indication of Dan's and Alex's skills at deception - especially where I'm concerned - they came first and second. And I'm in the position where I should be able to read them like a book! I'm afraid they were in a different league from Ben, who is obviously much too honest to play a game like this. Result : DH, AH, GH, TC, BH.
With five players, Smuggle lasted for the rest of the evening, giving the others enough time to finish their game of Outpost and fit in four games of Liar's Dice. They were, however, unable to record the results of the game very well, recording Steve G as finishing first and third in the second game and Steve O not finishing at all! I don't know, they're all fine when it comes to counting dice, but ask them to count the number of Steve Gs and they're lost without Geoff! Oh well, I'll have to average the results in the stats. As for Chris, they seem to have left him out altogether after the second game... - unless he went home early... Result 1 : MH, CD, SO, SG. Result 2 : S?, MH, S?, CD. Result 3 : MH, SO, SG. Result 4 : SG, MH+SO.
Speaking of Chris, there was one more point he asked me to put right. In last week's entry, I forgot to list the results of the game of Sherlock Holmes, and he felt it was a personal attack against him. He would like everyone to know that he won the game against all comers and has a logical and deductive mind and we all wish we were half as clever as he is, and the only reason he doesn't win more often is because, er,... well, never mind that. Anyway, I've added the results to last week's entry now.
Seven people along this week, including Karl, who hadn't been for a while due to work commitments. He'd finally managed to get down anyway as he's been itching to play something new for a while.
I started by showing them Ricochet Robot, the brain-melting game of ricocheting robots. One thing I always say about this game is that you need to see it through to the end before you can make a fair assessment of it. This argument didn't hold any water with Chris and Garry, who were having a bad time with it, so we abandoned the game about half-way through. Mick and Steve thought it was great, though, so perhaps we'll have to have it available for those occasions when we can split into two groups.
Speaking of splitting into two groups, that's what we did at this stage. Our group of three decided to play one of the new two-player games, Lost Cities. I know there were three of us, but Karl wanted to play something new, I fancied this game, which has definitely been growing on me, and Chris was happy to sit and watch the first game and join in with the second, after Karl left. The game with Karl was a bit of a back and forth affair, interspersed with a sick joke or two from Karl and, although I had a weak second hand, the third was decisive. In the game with Chris, I actually scored more than against Karl - it's just that Chris (yes, Chris) scored more. Again, the third hand was pretty decisive - Chris adding 111 to his score from that hand alone. Despite Chris being found with only five cards in his hand at one stage, I agreed that we would let the result stand, as I couldn't find where he had hidden the rest. Result 1 : TC, KB. Result 2: CD, TC.
For a run down on what the others were doing, I'll hand over to Garry:
Till Eulenspiegel is a neat little memory game which is a bit reminiscent of Pater Noster (or Comings & Goings or Vanished, as it is also known). Sixteen cards display 3 each of 5 different types of shoe, plus an Old Hag card. These are shuffled and laid out face down in 2 rows of 8 cards. The aim of the game is to progress down a line of customers who are searching for a particular type of shoe. If you turn over a correct shoe card, you can progress to the next customer or try and reveal an extra card of the same type. If you attempt the latter and are successful you move 3 customers down the line or can try to reveal the 3rd card of that type in the hope of moving 6 customers down the line. If you pick the wrong card or reveal the old hag your turn ends immediately. The further along the line you get the more demanding the customer. The early ones only require 1 of a particular shoe type, those in the middle want 2 and those at the end need all 3. First to get to the end of the line wins. A pretty simple game which remains closely contested because those lagging behind are able to follow the successful actions of those further down the line (provided they can remember where the right cards were). Result: SO, MH, GC+GL
We then got stuck into Alexander Der Grosse, one of the Historical Scenarios for Siedler. The basic mechanics are the same as the original, but the development of land is triggered by the movement of Alexander across the game board. On each turn Alexander will visit a Temple, an event space or a blank. At a temple, the site is auctioned and the successful bidder establishes a settlement there. At an event space, a treasure marker is auctioned and these treasures build towards a collection which will yield up to 4 VPs, depending how your collection compares with the other players'. Besides the movement of Alexander and the auctions, there is also the usual dice rolling and trading as in the normal rules. The game ends when a player amasses 14 VPs or Alexander finishes his journey.
Resources are very tight especially in the early part of the game when there are few settlements established. Besides developing your settlements, roads and armies, the resource cards also act as currency for the auctions so you need to weigh up whether your hand is better used for bidding on the Temple and Event spaces or developing your existing infrastructure. The map is carefully designed and ore, for instance, cannot be readily exploited until well into the game due its position on Alexander's route. This makes cities hard to develop until late in the game. The treasure collections are an added distraction and reward careful planning. The first person to collect 3 treasures gains the 4VP gift from Alexander, the next gets 3 VPs and the third 2 VPs. Fourth gets nothing until his collection becomes bigger than one of the other players. At this point the 2 players swap gifts. If all the players have the same number of treasures and player 4 takes the lead, he swaps his Zero VPs for the 4VPs held by the previous leader. Ouch!
I liked Alexander quite a lot. There is more to think about without being too complicated. We all thought we were feeling our way a bit with this first play and didn't appreciate certain aspects of the way the game started to develop until too late. Having learnt from this we all thought we would do things differently in a second game and I for one would be keen to try it again in the near future. Result: MH, GL, GC, SO.
Two more newcomers, giving the club a try: Paul Mills and Chris Wardle, coming from as far away as Burton. Welcome guys. This took our numbers to seven again.
We kicked off with Und Tschüss, the card game where you mustn't come second. This is one of those great games for large numbers and is a good way to get things rolling. Result : GL, PM, GC, MH, TC, SO, CW.
Garry had brought in his new copy of Tikal, this year's tip for the Spiel des Jahres prize, and we were all rather keen to play it. It is a game for four players max, though, so those who had arrived first had first call on it. I don't know much about how the game went, but it seemed to get a fairly good reaction. The only adverse comment was from Steve who thought it was too luck based, but that the optional rules for auctioning tiles would sort out that problem. And the only other thing I remember about it was Mick's comment during one of Steve's turns - "This is the slowest turn in the history of the world!" No wonder the game took all night. Result : MH, SO, GL+GC.
Meantime, I introduced the new boys to Ave Caesar, which I still rate as my favourite race game, especially with six. You do have to have more than one race, though, to even out the bad luck of the draw and being unable to get past the other chariots, and we played a full four race complement. Surprisingly enough, I did rather well, coming first in three of the races. Can't remember ever having done that before. Perhaps it was because the others were new to the game and took a while to get the hang of tactics - but I've never let lack of tactics stand in the way of my game-playing... Result: TC, PM, CW.
We followed up that with a game of Manhattan, the game of building skyscrapers. As we were short of time, and because it's more fun, we played the baby monster variant. In this version, the cards you play, as well as determining where you can build, also control the movement of the monster. When the monster lands on a building, it eats the top section, perhaps changing ownership of the building or even the neighbourhood. It speeds up the game because keeping the monster away from your buildings rules out certain card plays and because you can't plan so far ahead. We ran out of time while playing this and only completed five of the six rounds, but, strangely enough, that fifth round saw us all finish with one point between first and last place - and with me in the lead. It made me think that we should have found some way to get that last round in to escape the charge of game-rigging. Still, I think we all enjoyed the game. Result: TC, CW+PM.
And that's about it. I hope Paul and Chris had a good time and pay us another visit very soon. Cheers lads.
At last I've got up to date on the club reports! One of the main reasons for the delay has been writing (and editing down from it's colossal length) my report on Furrycon North. Go on, have a read, you know you'll like it...
Tikal fever was on the club this week as everyone seemed to want to play it. Well, there were six players and two of them had copies of the game so we set up as two groups of three, both playing Tikal.
For those who don't know, this is the game from this year's Nuremburg releases that seems to be causing a bit of a stir at the moment. It is about exploration and digging up ancient temples in the Mayan jungle. What this boiled down to in practice is that, each turn, a player turns over a hexagonal tile from the stack and adds it to the map (board), revealing a bit more of the jungle. Then there are a bunch of action points to be used up on things like excavating temples, moving 'archaeologists' (wooden pawns) about, and grabbing treasures (from the board or from other players). Three times during the game the tile turned over shows a volcano, naturally leading to a scoring round (the word 'volcano' being derived from the German 'wertung'), with everyone being given an extra set of action points before their own scores are calculated. Scores are for holding sets of treasures and, mainly, for having a majority of archaeologists at a temple - the score for each temple being dependent on how far it has been excavated.
I had been quite looking forward to playing this and really wanted to like it, but I found it rather boring in actual play - there's no other word for it. This wasn't helped by Garry trying for the long-turn record after Mick's comment about Steve last week - it brings tears to my eyes as I remember how he would count up through the action points as he used them "1, 2,...er...3 4 5,...6,..." and then would start undoing the move again and counting back down "no..., 5,... 4 3 2,... 3,...no, 2,...3...". I even had time during his moves to go over to the other table and recap the rules of Zirkus Flohcati for them. Our game took all evening and had to be rushed at the end, whilst the other table finished early enough to get some other games in. So, it may have helped if I was on the other table, but I don't really think so. I think that it probably is as boring as it seems. However quick you are, it does take a time to work out your move each turn - even when we were speeding things up by allowing a player to look at the tile he was going to get while the previous player was using his action points. This does mean a lot of downtime when your attention and interest wanders, even more so if you know what you want to do.
I think there are also timing problems about the scoring, which seems to favour those who get to do it first. And, for an exploration game, it didn't have the sense of excitement when a new tile appeared that games such as Entdecker and Mississippi Queen have. And, it didn't seem to matter too much what we did, as we all scored about the same in each scoring round, and the final results in both games were very close - not really a result I would have expected from a game that claims to reward planned and skilful play, especially when at least one of us didn't really care by the time it got near the end. I very quickly ruled this out as a game I could get the kids to play at home because they'd keep going off and doing other things between turns, and asking when it was going to be finished. It's strange that this game, which quite patently is not a family game, is released by Ravensburger's family games division and is a strong contender for Spiel des Jahres, a prize for best family game, while Ra, which is fast, light and good family material, is released by Ravensburger's 'gamers games' division and wasn't even shortlisted for the aforementioned prize. It's a topsy-turvy old world. Anyway, from being a game I was just going to buy on spec, it's dropped to a game that I would need to be persuaded to even play again. I also had a new meaning for the phrase 'Tikal Fever'... Result 1: SO, GC+MH. Result 2: TC+GL, CD.
In the time that we were finishing that off, the other table got in a game of Mamma Mia (Result: MH+SO, GC) and a few games of Zirkus Flohcati (Flea Circus) (Aggregated result: GC, MH, SO).
I won't be at the club next week (unless I turn up late), as I'm having a bit of a drink after work because it's my last week there. The following week I'll be trying to find another job.