Session Summary 24 January 2007

We had 8 people this week including first time visitor Kamil, I hope you had a good time and will visit again in the near future.

The games played were mainly new to the club;

Hollywood Blockbuster 60 mins
Player	Posn.	Score
Kamil	1	88
Jason	2	74
Dave D	3	41
Matt	4	36

This is Reiner Knizia's game of some years back released as Traumfabrik in Germany. The theme of the game is Hollywood movie making and the original used the names of real actor's and films. I believe that the reason the game was not released in an English language edition was due to licensing and copyright issues because of this. This new edition is by Uberplay and parodies of real named and titles are used, it being quite obvious from the names and caricatures on the tiles, who or what is being referred to.

In common with many of Knizia's titles, the game is basically a series of auctions for the components (directors, actors, special effects, etc) that will go to make the films that the players want to produce, each component has a star rating from 0 to 4 , except for 1 guest star value -1). There's quite often a twist in Knizia's auctions and in this case it is that the contracts (money) paid by the winning bidder is split equally between the other players, so as he gets poorer, they get richer. So it's a case of win auctions to acquire the best actors, directors etc. to make your films, after 4 rounds (called quarters) the player with the most points both from the value of completed films and the film awards won is the winner. The game is a good one, although it was pointed out that the distribution in the 2 party phases in each quarter may be a weakness, I notice this was previously also mentioned in the Counter review when Traumfabrik first appeared. In our game, Jason went into an early lead, but Kamil caught up and was able to take the victory by winning most of the Major film awards at the end of the game. Mike and I were meanwhile getting stuffed. One to play again soon I think.

Bug Bluff 20 mins
Player	Posn.
Kamil	1=
Mike	1=
Dave D	1=
Jason	4

This is a strange game that Kamil brought along. Basically it's a case of offering a card face down to another player and saying it is one of 8 types, the other player has to either say whether he thinks the first is telling the truth or look at the card and offer it to another player in the same way. Eventually a player will either choose to or be forced to guess truth or not and if they are wrong they must place the card face up in front of them, if right the person offering the card gets it in front of them. Whoever gets the card must now start the process again offering another card from their hand. The game goes on until a player loses by either losing all their in hand cards or having 4 of the same type of card face up in front of them, everyone else wins. The game is obviously pretty random at the start, but as the game goes on, you can try to predict whether someone is bluffing by looking at what card they have in front of them and what cards are in front of the other players. This was an interesting filler, but there are others we have that I think I would rather play.

San Juan 35 mins
Player	Posn.	Score
Dave D	1	37
Mike	2	32
Jason	3	20

After Kamil left, the rest of us played San Juan, getting right into it as all had played before. All players had reasonable production so producing and trading went on OK. Mike followed a straight Guild Hall strategy with 7 production buildings. I played for violet buildings using Quarry and Carpenter to add to a couple of monuments and the City Hall, I was also ahead on total number of buildings and finishing the game by building a Palace was able to push me ahead.

Wildlife 120 mins
Player	Posn.	Score
Gordon	1	103
Steve P	2=	97
Steve H	2=	97
Richard B	4	88

This was played on the other table, I know that the game has been about for awhile, although never played at the club before. Comments welcome as to how it plays.

See you Wednesday.