by John Kanost
6 MarchWe enjoyed National Employee Appreciation day at work last Friday, March 3. Our company provided donuts and our choice of smoothies or coffee beverages for breakfast (they took orders from everybody who wanted one) and mine was excellent. Later in the afternoon, my manager offered us the option of taking off work an hour early either that day or one day the following week. I decided to save mine for Monday, so I was able to show up for game night at the comic store at 4:30! (I usually don't make it there until around 6:00, after first going home and picking up the kids, but this time my wife dropped them of for me.) Thanks to that, I was able to get in an extra game or two this week, including two that were new to me.
Game: The King is Dead
[user=ayahoo16]Steve[/user] arrived not too long after I did, and Zach shortly after him. With just the three of us waiting for more gamers to arrive, we looked for something quick to lay, and Steve pulled out this abstract area control game. Area control is quickly becoming one of my favorite board gaming mechanisms, but I've never been all that enthusiastic about abstracts, so a game that smashed them together had me a bit dubious. The game board is a map of Great Britain, divided up into various geographical regions; three colored factions (red, blue, and yellow) vie for control of these regions through the actions of the players over the course of 8 rounds; one for each region. Through cardplay, players will add, remove, and manipulate cubes of three colors across the board, and at the end of each round one region will become controlled by the faction whose cubes are dominant. Players will claim a cube, removing it from the board, after each action, trying to build up a majority in the color that holds majority on the board at the game's end. There is no limit to the number of actions (i.e. cards) a player can play in a round; even if you pass, the round won't end until all the players pass in succession so if someone else plays a card after you pass, you can still react with more cards of your own. However, once played, your cards do not return to you... once you run out of cards to play, all you can do is pass--even if you play out all your cards in the first round! (Pro tip: that's not a winning strategy!)
I started out the game with four yellow cubes (assigned to me by randomly drawing them out of the cube bag) which was unusual but gave me a clear direction: promote the yellow agenda! Zach to my right was clearly going for blue dominance, while Steve went after a mix of red and yellow. I ultimately fought for both red and yellow, while hosing blue at every opportunity (sorry Zach!) and had quite a back-and-forth battle with Steve who did his best to stay ahead of me in majority for both red and yellow. I spent my last card in the seventh round, while Steve still had three of his left for the final round. Zach was too far behind at that point to catch up, as board majority was clearly going to go to either red or yellow depending on what Steve did.
Steve's cards ultimately caused red to take the lead on the board, and he seemed to think he was going to win, until we actually counted up our cubes and realized that he and I were tied on both red and yellow. Steve then informed me that I was the winner, thanks to the rule that says in case of a tie, the player who played all of their cards out first wins!
Game: Acquire
A few weeks ago, Zach had brought in one of the recent additions of the classic Sid Sackson game, Acquire and taught Steve and a few others how to play. Shop owner Bill has an original 1962 printing in the store's game library, and wanted to play it this time. Mark and his son Jeremy arrived as we were setting up, and joined us, bringing the count to six, and then just before we began the game, my wife dropped off my boys. So we added them and played an eight player game.
If you've never played Acquire, it's a stock-trading game about the hotel industry. The game board is a simple 12x9 grid, each cell assigned a letter-number combination so that each space has a unique designation. There are matching tiles for each space that are played onto the grid; each turn a player must play one tile to the board from their personal hand of six, then draw a replacement. Whenever a second tile is played directly adjacent to one already on the board, a hotel is formed, and the player who formed it decides which of the seven hotel chains it will be by taking a colored tile and stacking it atop the adjacent ones on the board. They then acquire a free stock card from that chain. Additional tiles played adjacent to already-formed hotels simply add to its size.
After playing her tile, if there are active hotels on the board, the player may choose to purchase stock. Each player starts the game with $5-6,000 dollars (varies with player count) to spend; cost spreadsheet player aids determine the cost of shares for the various chains based on that chain's market value and current size. You may buy up to three stocks from any of the currently available hotel chains, limited of course by your available funds. The 7 hotel chains, from least to most valuable, are: Luxor (red), Tower (yellow), American (blue), Festival (green), Worldwide (brown), Continental (teal), and Imperial (magenta).
The goal of the game is to make money through hotel acquisitions. Whenever two hotels become connected on the board, the larger one will acquire the smaller, and whoever owns the most and second-most shares of the acquired hotel gets a payout, based on the hotel's size at the time of acquisition. The acquired hotel's colored tile returns to the supply, and that chain may be formed again later in the game. After the payout for first and second place shareholders, everyone in player order who has shared in that hotel may choose to sell off their stock, again at the value of that chain at the time it was acquired.
Once a hotel reaches 11 tiles in size, it can no longer be acquired. The game continues until either one hotel effectively consumes all the others, reaching 41 tiles in size, or all hotels have hit 11 tiles, meaning no more acquisitions are possible. Once one of these two states have been reached, any player may elect to call for the game's end on their turn. Then final payouts will occur based on the current board state and stocks in hand. The wealthiest player after this is the winner! In our game, Worldwide grew and grew until it reached 42 tiles in size, but three more players took their turns after this, hoping to acquire more stocks and see their value increase before someone finally ended the game.
I have never been drawn to stock trading games; there's nothing appealing to me in it and that's why I'd never played this or other games, like Stockpile, before. As I expected, Acquire was kind of mediocre for me. I do think that playing it with 8 wasn't the best; at such a high player count it felt far too tactical to me and impossible to make any long term plans or strategies. Overall just very random; even when I had tiles that I could make plans with, most rounds by the time it came back to my turn the board had completely changed and nothing I'd intended to do was possible, or was no longer effective. I might be willing to play the game again at a lower player count, but I certainly wouldn't seek it out.
Game: Anachrony
This is the game I really wanted to play tonight! Matthew and Jonathan and I started setting it up, and then Bill joined us. I got to teach it for the first time, and it went pretty smoothly. Sadly, because Acquire took so long, after set up and teaching, it was after 8:00 PM by the time we finally actually started playing the game. As a result, we weren't able to finish... we played until after 9:30, and made it to the fourth, just shy of Impact. It was enough for everybody to get a taste of the game, though, and all three of the new players seemed to like it. The time travel mechanic in this game is something unique and so far seems to be really popular, although Matthew was very hesitant about using it to get "free stuff" from his future self--even in the fourth round when we realized we weren't going to finish the game.
So far I'm really liking the Path of Salvation; I certainly think their miniatures are the coolest of the sculpts. Jonathan of course likes the Path of Dominance; their more aggressive backstory and the fact that their exosuits look like KRAKENS. Matthew picked the Path of Harmony, leaving Bill to play Progress. Before we ended, I'd just gotten my first Anomaly and was wondering how I was going to deal with it. I wish we'd gotten to finish out our game!
7 March
While I'd planned on probably joining the Harrisburg gang again this week, two things happened to change my plans. First, [user=slayn000]Jamie[/user] announced that even though it was an "off week" for Beermongers gaming with the Cabal, he was "itching" to play some games and decreed that they would host two Beermongers nights in a row, this week and next. Since I knew I'd be unable to game there on the 14th, (I have an after-work meeting, plus it's my son's 17th birthday), I decided it'd behoove me to attend since I'd not get another opportunity for several weeks. Second, I need to arrange to meet with fellow gamer Brian, to deliver his Eclipse expansion, Shadow of the Rift that I'd picked up for him while we were out in Ohio. He was planning to be at Beermongers this week, so it made perfect sense to meet him there.
Unlike last time when I arrived early and found myself thumb-twiddling for a good twenty minutes waiting for others to arrive, this week I showed up to find Don, [user=chrissc]Chris[/user], and Peter already sitting at the table chatting while they waited for more folks to arrive. Don was preparing to teach Black Orchestra, a cooperative game about plotting to assassinate Hitler! I was intrigued, at least until I found out it was a co-op; then I was honestly a little relieved to hear his player count was already full.
While we talked, Jamie walked in, followed by a newcomer to the game night, a fellow named Gil from Ephrata (but originally from Brazil!) Gil had with him a game I was keenly interested in learning, given my up-and-coming commitment to running four Envoy demos of it in the month of April: Cry Havoc. Even though I'd brought several games with me, including Anachrony, that I'd have loved to have played, I couldn't pass up an opportunity to learn Cry Havoc ahead of schedule!
Game: Cry Havoc
In this game, each player takes on the role of one of four factions fighting over control of an alien planet and its resources. With a full four players, once player will be the Trog, the hulking troll-like creatures native to the planet, but since we only had three, the Trog were run automatically by the game system. I played the Human marines, Gil the sentient, xenopathic Machines, and Dennis played the mysterious Pilgrims. There's a back story to this game, and each of the factions supposedly has their own unique outlook on life, the universe, and everything, but those don't seem to factor too much into gameplay beyond flavoring a bit of each faction's unique technology. Each side is pretty much just competing for points; I will say that we played a simple version of the game and only used default action cards, so that might have made a difference in how thematic the game felt.
This game has an interesting structure: 5-6 rounds, but the game can end sooner if a certain condition is met to enable final scoring early. Each round has three action rounds where each player takes a turn and chooses one of their actions to perform, most of which involve playing one or more action cards. Card contain varying combinations of Movement, Recuitment, and Construction symbols on them; the player chooses which symbols to activate and how many cards to combine to reach the number they need to do what they want. As you recruit troops and move them out across the planet, you'll encounter variable bonuses, but usually you'll also run into groups of Trog, or eventually other players' units that you'll have to fight. Each player also has a unique set of structures they can build and activate on the board, each with their own abilities that can contribute to their strategy or hinder the other players strategies.
The combat system is also 3-tiered, involving separate combat actions that normally resolve from top to bottom: Control, Capture, and Attrition. The attacker must have a majority of troops in the top row to gain control of a region, forcing the enemy combatants to retreat to their home base; the defender wins ties for this space. Gaining control of a region earns the victor 2 victory points. Capturing enemy troops also requires a majority, but allows the winner, be it the attacker or defender, to remove one troop from any combat action space, including one that hasn't resolved yet. Captured troops are removed permanently from play until the owner spends 2 victory points to retrieve them. On the final combat action, Attrition, majority does not matter; for every troop you have assigned to it when it resolves, you may kill one other troop also in the battle, earning a VP for each. Killed troops are returned to the owners' reserves.
Combats are resolved immediately following the three action rounds; after this comes end of round scoring, where players earn 1 VP for every "cyrstal", representing the planet's natural resources, in regions they control. In addition, the player who played their "Enable Scoring" card during the round will score bonus points for every region on the board they control.
In our game, I tried a "rush" strategy, recruiting nearly all my soldiers the first round and then moving out to control as many regions as possible as quickly as possible. I got very lucky with the Trog nests I encountered, only finding one with three in it and thus winning most of my battles for quite a lot of controlled regions by the mid-game. In addition, I was able to play my Enable Scoring card in THREE out of the five rounds, which was HUGE. I probably wouldn't have made out quite as well as I did if Gil hadn't suffered a run of bad luck early in the game, however, coming across multiple well-defended Trog nests and losing at least two of his early battles. Dennis actually lead in scoring early in the game, playing the Pilgrims and constructing all sorts of weird buildings all over the place. I passed him up once my area majority scoring got going, however, and finished the game 28 points in the lead.
In an interesting twist of fate, my copy of Cry Havoc showed up from Portal the very next day (along with my Aztecs expansion for Imperial Settlers)!
Game: Fuji Flush
Gil left us to join Jamie's table, where they were just starting up a game of Ethnos; meanwhile Miles came over having finished playing Ashes and joined Dennis and I for a few rounds of Fuji Flush. We played three games; I won the first but then Miles won the second and third games. While the game works just fine at three players, I'm of the opinion that it's a much better game with a larger group: at least four, but preferably in the 5-8 range for more potential for players combining smaller numbers to beat larger ones. However Fuji Flush does play faster with a low player count, and that's just what we needed as the evening was wrapping up.
8 March
What's this? Gaming on a Wednesday? That's a very rare occurance for me but one that is always welcome.
Having left work early to go to an eye doctor appointment where I had to have my pupils dilated (always a fun treat), I found myself sitting at home in the dark unable to focus on anything near my face with my glasses on. Taking them off allowed me to read text if it was inches from my face, but as usual left me unable to see anything farther out but The Blur. I am really nearsighted.
I usually drive my kids to their teen class at our church on Wednesday evening, but being seeing-impaired for the evening meant that was out. My wife wasn't feeling very well either, so we decided to stay home. It wasn't too long before Matthew asked if we could play something.
Game: Batman: The Animated Series Dice Game
I picked this up on a whim last weekend from the comic shop after running the Coal Baron card game splash there on Saturday. We own several dice games already, but only Carcassonne Dice is of the 15-minute filler variety and none of us really like it well enough for it to get played often. We've never gotten any of the Steve Jackson dice games, but I've layed both Zombie and Martian Dice and enjoyed them both, and I suspected this would be very much along those lines. And it was only 12 bucks with a 20% discount!
My suspicions were borne out and the game played very much like Zombie Dice; there are three colors of dice with three different symbols on the faces: the Batsignal, a sack of Loot, and an Alarm. Loot is most common on the grey dice, with the Batsignal most common on the yellow, blue being the median. In this game, up to four players are the villains: Catwoman, The Riddler, Joker, or Poison Ivy. On your turn, you draw three dice randomly out of the dice cup (we really need to get a dice bag for this game; the pulling dice out of the narrow cup proved rather unwieldy, plus it's disturbingly loud when shaken to mix up the dice). Rolling the dice, you want to see and collect Loot while avoiding Batman! You'll keep of those faces rolled, but can reroll Alarms, drawing as many more dice needed out of the cup to roll three again. You may stop rolling after any roll and score points for each Loot, but if you push your luck past its breaking point, three Batsignals means you lose everything.
Depending on which villain you are, you will have a varying method of scoring extra points. I played Catwoman, who receives 2 points for every blue Loot symbol she collects, but only if she successfully scores. Jonathan played the Joker, who gets a point for collecting sets of the three colors, no matter what faces are showing and regardless of whether successfully scoring Loot or not. Matthew was the Riddler, who has no point bonuses but may roll four dice instead of three on his first roll each turn, and may return any of them he doesn't want back to the cup--even Batsignals. Nobody played as Poison Ivy, so I don't remember what she does.
You play until someone reaches 30 points. I started out strong, achieving a 12-point lead over my first two turns thanks to lucky rolls of lots of blue Loot. Then things went sour and I never scored more than 2 or 3 points on a turn the rest of the game. Jonathan and Matthew both surpassed my score, and I came in last with a final score of 21. Matthew did a little better than I at 22, but Jonathan's Joker was the winner!
Game: King of Tokyo
Still in the dice game mood, but wanting something more than a "roll dice for twenty mintues" filler, we turned to the King of Tokyo box, which now contains everything we own for both KoT and King of New York, including all promos, and Power Up expansions for both games (but not the Halloween expansion--don't own that one yet). Matthew suggested KoNY, but I felt like keeping it simpler, so I said we should play King of Tokyo but could use any of the monster, since we now have the KoT Power Up cards for the KoNY monsters. Jonathan decided on Rob the giant robot, Matthew opted to take my personal favorite, Captain Fish, and I chose to try Mega Shark, the new monster that came with the King of New York Power Up expansion.
We played two games. The first, Matthew won by destroying the rest of us. He got into Tokyo and stayed there, and had two turns where he rolled almost nothing but Claws; the first sent Jonathan and me scampering to try and roll some Hearts to recover our HP (we mostly failed) and the second finished us off. The second game, I won by reaching 20 points. I rolled multiple 3s over the first several rounds of the game, earning myself at least 9 points this way, and then took Tokyo and managed to hang out there for three rounds thanks to being able to heal by purchasing the "Nuclear Power Plant" card, which also game me a 2-star VP boost in addition to healing me back up to 10 HP. Right before they finally did enough damage to me to force me out (at 18 VP), I acquired the "Sleepwalker" card. I was already sitting on 5 energy, so I only needed to roll one to win on my next turn, and I did. Woo-hoo!
9 March
Game: Cry Havoc
Jonathan and Matthew helped me unbox, punch and organize the components on Wednesday evening; tonight they were ready to learn the game! I had invited our gaming buddy Brandon over to join us, but he wasn't able to make it, so we wound up playing a 3-player game just like my first game on Tuesday night. However, as I read through the rules for the first time to prepare to teach them, I spotted quite a few ways in which we had played incorrectly two nights before. This didn't really surprise me, since when he was teaching us, Gil admitted that he'd only played the game twice before. One thing we'd done wrong the entire game on Tuesday was forget to add crystals to the board before each battle resolution; another (that really changed the game play quite a bit) was retreating the Trog after a battle. We were simply removing leftover Trog troops from play after each battle that we won, rather than following the rules to retreat them to an adjacent uncontrolled region and add another Nest token.
Most of the other rules mistakes that were made in my previous game were pretty minor, though. For this game, I played the Pilgrims, Matthew the Machines, and Jonathan the Human Marines. I knew Jonathan would enjoy this game, and he grasped it right away, playing the Human faction better than I did on Tuesday. I did not do very well with the Pilgrims; making minimal use of their abilities to manipulate crystals. Matthew had fun playing the Machines, putting up buildings all over the place and amassing a massive machine army, but then found that he couldn't get enough move cards to get much done with them. He had almost all his troops out and occupying a single region of the board, and didn't realize that simply having the most troops didn't mean he was doing well until the final round when Jonathan's score rocketed past 50 while his points continued to trickle in slowly.
Looking forward to many more plays of this game! Our game did end early because of Jonathan's large point gains, and I began to understand why many of the reviewers who played this game all said they felt like it was too short. Better a game that leaves us wanting more (and to play it again) than one that outstays its welcome!
10 March
Game: Faux•Cabulary
Amy and I had to make a stop at our local AT&T store after I got off work this evening to get her a new phone, and by the time we finished all that we were both rather hungry, so we stopped in and checked out a relatively new pizza place that opened up last fall, MOD Pizza. I ordered the "Calexico" and it was excellent.
But we returned home rather late, so we only had time for something short and simple. Amy picked this Apples to Apples variant at Goodwill last weekend. It uses the same "play to the judge" concept as A2A but instead of matching words to descriptors, you are "building" made-up words to fit various silly definitions; "A furry, five-legged mammal" for example. One player is the judge or "Wordmeister" and reads the definition off a card. The other players all receive three chunky white cubes with pieces and parts of words on all the faces in blue text. The cubes have things like "matic", "oxious", or "über" on them, and your job is to arrange the three cubes however you like to come up with a made up word to match the current definition.
The results often (but not always) generate some laughter as the Wordmeister reads them off; the rules encourage you to try to use the words in sentences for maximum effect. The card is awarded to the player who crafted the best word--in the Wordmeister's opinion, of course. The game ends when one players wins a certain number of cards.
The game was fun, but with only 21 word cubes to go around, I started seeing a lot of repetition early into the game. I don't think it would stay fresh through very many plays for me. There are expansions for the game, but I rarely play party games, so they're probably unnecessary for us.
11 March
Today was Friends of Midtown Game Day, a board gaming event held at the Harrisburg Midtown Arts Center all day. Many, many of my fellow gamer friends were planning on being there, and I was hoping to spend some time there playing games as well. It took some cajoling, but my whole family agreed to try it out with me. (I was invited to last year's event as well, but wasn't able to make it.)
The event was scheduled to begin at noon, so we left the house around 11:25 and headed up to our state's capital, only to spend another 20-30 minute circling around and around the area of HMAC trying to find parking. I have no idea what else was going on in town that day, but the streets were packed and jammed with cars and people. Capital Street, where the event organizers suggested comers could find free on-street parking, was completely full. Being unfamiliar with the city and its parking regulations, I was uncertain where else it was safe to park (I saw at least one ticket-writer out writing parking tickets, and I've had several bad experienced in the past with having my car towed or almost towed, so I wasn't about to take any chances).
We finally found some metered parking spaces open on Forster Street, about a ten-minute walk from HMAC. I had no idea how long we were going to stay, and didn't fancy hoofing it back to the car over and over again to buy more time. There was supposed to be an app that would not only give me four free hours for signing up, but also allow me to pay and add more time remotely but... for some reason my phone could not connect to the App Store. So I overpaid for the full allowable time and then we started walking.
Did you know that a Broken Token cargo bag full of board games like Scythe, Anachrony, and Terraforming Mars is very very heavy? My shoulders are still sore today.
Well, we walked in to find the event in full swing, but at least one fellow gamer, Brian, knew we were coming and was looking forward to playing something with me and had "reserved" us a table. It was a bit small, though, so after spotting a larger one that appeared to only be in use as a storage repository for someone's game collection, we negotiated the removal of said games and claimed the table for our own use.
There being five of us, and no one else at that time apparently looking to get into a game, I suggested and then set up Terraforming Mars.
I did not play Terraforming Mars.
Well, I was going to, but just before we were about to get started, a fellow named Jay walked up and started perusing our setup, obviously interested in the game, and I offered him my spot, figuring I could teach and get some credit for demoing. I could always get in on whatever the next game we played turned out to be.
Turned out to be nothing, as this play of Terraforming Mars turned out to be one of the longer ones I've experienced, going about 3.5 hours. Some of that was due to AP/slow play, but I suspect this was for the most part caused by the loudness of the venue which was pretty detrimental to communication. And by the time we finished, my wife and son were ready to scoot. Crowds and constant high-volume auditory barrage can be very draining, and they were well-drained. So we left.
Game: Anachrony
But I still got to play this when we got home! My son was interested in getting back to it and finishing a game this time, so we played just the two of us. He took the Path of Progress and I tried a new one for me, Harmony. I decided I would go all in on the bonus condition for Harmony's female leader, especially after acquiring a Lab that gave me a home board action to recruit a Genius every round. I wound up collecting a total of 21 extra points when I evacuated the capital, thanks to having 7 geniuses + 7 gold.
Jonathan hasn't figured this title out yet, which is unusual for him; he typically understands new games very quickly and often wins his first time playing. But the good new is that he enjoyed it anyway, and wants to play again and figure it out, so there ought to be many more hours of fun to be had from this Kickstarter!
