Basari (24th)
Big Deal (3rd)
Chip-Chip Hurrah (24th & 31st)
Choice (24th)
Danger (31st)
Das Amulett (17th)
Digit / Pick-it (24th)
Dragon's Gold (3rd)
Gnadenlos (24th)
Grusel Wusel / Trick 'r Treat (24th)
Hornochsen (24th)
Liar's Dice (17th)
Medina (31st)
Meridian (24th)
Nur Peanuts (17th)
Odysseus (24th)
Pirat (24th)
Sky Runner (31st)
Zirkus Flohcati (24th)
I arrived tonight to find Steve G, Garry, Geoff, Steve O and his lad Jonathan engaged in a game of Dragon's Gold. This is mostly a game of negotiating with the aim of collecting sets of small coloured wooden coins representing different types of gem. Four dragon cards are laid out in the middle. Each has: a number of treasure counters drawn randomly; a number indicating a further, hidden, supply of treasure and a number indicating the strength of the dragon. Each player has a set of cards, with values from 1 to 4, which can be played alongside the dragons - to battle them. The lower value cards have special abilities.
As soon as the total value of cards played alongside a dragon reaches its strength value, it is defeated. Further counters may be added to those on the card to represent the hidden treasure. Then an egg timer is started and negotiations can begin. All players who played cards against this dragon (i.e. contributed to the victory) negotiate to decide how to divide up the treasure. Unless all those players agree before the egg timer runs out, all the treasure counters are confiscated - otherwise they are divided up as agreed.
The special value cards allow whoever played them to take all red counters before negotiations begin (1 - Wizard) or to blindly steal a counter from another player involved in the fight (2 - Thief). Once the dragon is resolved, another is dealt out to replace it.
This continues until all the dragon cards or, more realistically, all the treasure counters are gone. Points are then awarded for majorities in various counter colours, except for gold, silver and red which score for each one collected. I played this game at Ramsdencon and found it to be rather tedious, repetitive and lacking excitement. I was not sorry to have missed the start of this game and found watching it revived all my poor memories of it.
In a moment of inspiration engendered largely by Greg Schloesser's reports from Westbank Gamers, I asked the players to rate this game and the next from 1 to 10 and, apart from Jonathan's erratic scoring, we were fairly consistent. I'll include the rating in brackets after each name. Result: GL(4), JO(10), SG(4), SO(4½), GC(4). I think I may have gone as low as 2 myself...
Next we played Big Deal, another game I played at Ramsdencon and enjoyed but wasn't sure enough to buy. This is themed as a business game, but isn't one of the traditional types where you buy resources, process them and sell the results. It is more in the school of Tycoon, my favourite business game, where things are a bit more abstract and quick flowing. I'll try to describe it, but I'm having trouble thinking of where to start without going into great detail.
Basically, you collect shares of companies. Once you have two or more you can start up that company provided you have the necessary resources. There are four types of resource in the game and they can be bought and sold at a price that varies depending on their availability. However, you can only buy up to three and sell up to three resources per turn, so you may have to plan for longer to start up your company.
If you have one more shares of a company that another player has created, you can attempt a take-over. You place your shares on the table and offer the other player a price per share for theirs. They can then either accept or offer you an increased counter-bid for your shares. This continues until one player accepts the offer from the other and sells their shares. If the take-over is unsuccessful you get to sell shares that you weren't going to use - possibly for a high price. Often that is why you make the take-over bid in the first place. If the take-over is successful and you have the resources to open the company for yourself, you can get a bonus payment. This is the same as the payment a player gets for each company they have active at the start of their turn..
And, with a few trimmings, that is the game. I had been taught to play by Holger Hermann from Spielbar who had taken quite an aggressive line and I spent the first few turns showing the other players what kind of aggressive things you could do, particularly to do with take-over cards. (By the way, the translation of the rules that we had was wrong in relation to take-over cards, and it wasn't until Steve G read the German rules later that his explanation rang memory bells in my head and I realised he was right and the translated rules were wrong.)
Anyway, having shown the others how to aggressively attack someone else's company, they then practised on me - almost all of them. This left me somewhat short of money. Shorter than I thought, for when I then tried a take-over of Steve O's company for a high price, I found myself short of cash to open it. Worse, I forgot or overlooked the easy option for raising cash of selling one or two shares to the bank. As such I found I didn't have enough money to open and so lost the startup bonus and the payout when it came round to my turn again. Doh! It took me a long time to start to recover from that position.
The game was progressing rather slowly and we found that we weren't going to have time to finish - and with it we found a downside to the game: you can't end it at a known, fixed point. The game normally finishes at random when the seventh 'game over' card is drawn from the share pile, so leaving uncertainty as to when to bail out. Various suggestions were made to end the game early, but when you know exactly when the game will end, the first players after that decision is made are going to benefit greatly. We concluded that we wouldn't be able to get any results and would just have to declare the game incomplete. Actually, it later occurred to me that we could have just removed share cards from the draw pile to increase the concentration of game over cards. Next time, perhaps. Despite that, a good game, and one that has continued to grow on me in retrospect as I write this. I must play some more - I may buy it yet. Result (ratings): SG(5)+GL(6)+GC(6)+JO(1)+SO(8)+TC(7).
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I didn't attend the club tonight. Instead I was off to see John Shuttleworth in concert. And an excellent show it was too. If you need a good laugh and haven't discovered him, then click that link.
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I needed to turn up to the club tonight to deliver a joint order of games we had made from Germany. I arrived to find them playing Liars' Dice, an old favourite of ours that I don't think I've played for a while. Result: SO, MH, GC, GL, SG.
Next, Garry got out another of his recent acquisitions, Das Amulett. This is a strategic resource collection and bidding game from Alan Moon and (I think) Aaron Weissblum. The game is very pretty and includes a collection of variously coloured 'gems'. Players collect these and display them on their amulet card. The first to collect seven different or any eight of these is the winner. Each round of the game consists of a number of phases.
In the first phase, a number of spells are made available and bid for in a similar way to The Big Idea. You have ten bidding tokens and the amount bid is placed onto the spell card. Each turn you get back one or two of these tokens and once the last token comes off a spell, it is discarded. This limits how many spells you can have on the go and means that the length of effect depends on how much you bid. The spells have various special effects that give you certain advantages in the other phases, and these seem to be critical in deciding the result - as we shall see.
The spells also each have an income in one of the four resources (metals) available in the game and the second phase is to collect this income. These resources are used for bidding in the next phase when the game marker is moved to one of the regions of the board and an auction is held using the resource denoted by that region. The winner of the auction takes one of the gems available from that region and moves the marker on to another region. Between three and six regions are contested each round.
Mick and I came off quite badly in the first few rounds through losing out in the spells auctions. The more spells you have, the more resources you get, the more gems you can get, the more bidding tokens free up each round, the more you can bid for new spells, etc... To be fair, we were probably victims of our own newness at the game and had put most of our bidding tokens onto the spells we had started the game with - reducing our bidding power. Strangely enough, though, those who had gotten off to a good start seemed to slow down a bit - perhaps as a result of being attacked as perceived leaders. My fortunes turned around in the middle of the game when I had a combination of spells that allowed me a huge income in one of the resource types and the right to use that resource in any bidding. And then towards the end, I got a spell that allowed me to take an extra gem whenever I won one. This was enough for a late game surge that enabled me to win. Another thing - I was the only player who was going for eight gems, which meant I could collect any, whereas the others were avoiding duplicates.
I don't know how much I like the game. My early poor fortunes were kind of because of my own mistakes, whereas my later recovery was the luck of which spells came up when I had enough tokens to bid high enough for them. Actually, one thing I actually did that improved my chances was to bid on spells whenever I got the chance and tried to buy them cheap so that I could keep a regular flow of tokens. There are a lot of interesting things happening, though. By the way, Mick's early bad run continued throughout the game. Result (game rating): TC (6), SG (7), GL (7), SO(5), MH(5)+GC(3).
To follow, we played one of my new games, Nur Peanuts. This is quite a light and unthemed game where players move their tokens around trying to land on the highest value spaces. They have a choice of different weighted dice to move with and can keep going until they are happy - or their money runs out. For it costs to move on from a space, depending on how good that space is. Even worse, if someone owns the space, you have to pay them instead of the bank. The fun of the game is watching those players who get caught in the spiral of paying time after time and getting either worse spaces or only slightly better ones. It's a killer as you can easily spend more than you will save. After spending once, you are torn between "cutting your losses" and "in for a penny, in for a pound".
There are also two different victory conditions. If no-one runs out of cash, cash is irrelevant and the first to win is the one who first gets five or six properties. If, on the other hand (and this has happened each time I have played), someone goes bankrupt, then the winner is determined by how much cash you have, and properties mean nothing. There's a certain amount of luck and a lot of self-control needed to win. But it's great fun. Result (game rating): MH(5), GL(6), TC(7)+SO(7), SG(4), GC(5).
This weekend I'm off to Beer 'n Pretzels games convention at Burton on Trent. I'll do a report on it if I ever get round to it...
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A good turnout tonight, including Goran Farm, who had come a couple of weeks ago for the first time, but who I met for the first time tonight. Welcome Goran, and I hope we see much more of you.
There were so many games played tonight, and as I am a bit behind with these reports (sorry, I've been ill for weeks now...), I'm just going to list the games and their results for tonight, even though there are a couple that I ought to go into a bit more detail about. (I may add detail later...)
- Choice: GL, JO, MH, SO.
- Basari: CD, NC, GC, SC.
- Odysseus: SG, TC, SK.
- Pirat: GF, SK, TC, SG.
- Zirkus Flohcati: GC, GF+CD+NC, SC.
- Meridian: NC, GC, CD, SC.
- Gnadenlos: GL, SO, MH, JO.
- Gnadenlos: GL, JO, MH, SO.
- Hornochsen: SK, SG, GF, TC.
- Digit / Pick-It: GL, MH, SO.
- Grusel Wusel / Trick 'r Treat: ?
- Chip Chip Hurrah: SG, TC, GF.
- Choice (inc. scores): MH(+360), SO(-160), CD(-250), GL(-280), JO(-800).
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Somewhat ill tonight, so I got to the club rather late to find Steve G and his daughter Sophie in the middle of a game of Medina with Garry. This is the latest one from Stefan Dorra and has a load of wooden bricks which you place on the board grid to form a little town, gaining points for certain placements. I sat and watched as they played - not being mentally up to much more - and occasionally asked questions or gave advice. Not that people always want advice... Steve seemed to be having a difficult time at one point in the game and was driven to sneer that he had a least one more point than me. I had to remind him that this may have been due to the fact that I wasn't playing.
The game went down very well and I think they really enjoyed it and would readily play again. I'll have to try it out sometime. Result (rating): sG(8), SG(7), GL(8).
Before I'd got there, they had been playing Sky Runner, a game I'm not too keen on - the tower gimmick in the box is more of a hindrance than a help. But I guess it appeals to the younger ones - which may explain the ratings. Result (rating): GL(5), SG(8½), SG(3).
After Medina, we wanted something quick and light, so I took the opportunity to show them Chip-Chip Hurrah. This is one of Klaus Teuber's children's games and is a lot of fun. Each player has two robots, which contain a die in their base. The board is ridged and sits on top of the box. Each turn, a player uses a flipper to flip a 'computer chip' onto the board. Then each player can move one of their robots to try to get near the chip - or to block other robots. As the robots move, the dice are rolled by contact with the ridged board. All the robots who get to the chip have their dice revealed, add on the number of chips they already have, and the highest takes the chip to insert in the back of their robot. Once a robot has four chips, it comes off the board, and once both your robots are off the board, you have won. The game is fun and easy to play and the robots, with their simulated oily look, are a pleasure to play with. Result: SG(5), sG(6)+GL(5)+TC(6).
We followed with one of Garry's new card games, Danger. Briefly, this is a Blackjack type game where you are collecting sets in four different colours at once. Each turn you pick up a card from the draw pile and add it to your set of that colour - if it is still open. The card values vary from 2 to 9 and, if you go over 15 in a colour, you are bust and score nothing for that colour. So, after placing a card, you can close one or more of your colours to safeguard it. A couple of twists are that you cannot close a colour if you currently have the lowest (or joint lowest) total showing for that colour and that, at the end of the hand, the lowest score for each colour is ignored. As soon as one played has closed all four of their colours, the hand ends and is scored. Play is over a number of rounds - we played four before time ran out. Typically, I was coming first after the first round, second after the second, third after the third, but managed to hold off from slipping to fourth, probably because of Garry's appalling first round. Result: SG, sG, TC, GL.
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