Session Summary – 21 May 2008

Seven this week. The split was initially 4 & 2 with Dave & Ben playing a variety of games, while Steve H, Simon, new visitor Jeremy and I set up Pillars of the Earth, which we were trying for the first time with the new expansion. Mike turned up a little late, but joined the four of us, the expansion extending the game up to 6 players. Following I'll first talk in general about the additions to the game without being too specific, followed by some commentary on our game finishing with some personal opinions, also included and some picture of the new additions.
The idea of the game is still the same with the players seeking to gain prestige through their efforts in the construction of Kingsbridge Cathedral. In addition to extra components to support 2 more players, the expansion provides an extension to the board with new spaces for Master Builders and workers to be placed, together with new cards (Craftsman, Privilege, Event, a single resource card and a special card (Inspiration in St. Denis) obtained by sending a master builder to France). 6 of the new craftsmen were originally given away by Spielbox magazine and I am not sure whether they are also included in other language editions of the expansion.
The sequence of play is the same, with extra options in each stage. In the first you now have the option to allocate workers to the king for the crusades, there being 4 spaces on the board for this, which earn 1 or 2 VPs, when the spaces are activated in stage 3. In addition with 5 players there are more craftsmen and resource cards to choose from. There are now a possible 6 craftsmen for each turn, of which 5 are used with 5 or more players and 4 with less. 8 resource cards out of the 10 now available (including the new 1 worker gets 1 sand Gravel Pit) are used with 5 players and all 10 with 6. The new resource card is not used with less than 5 players.
In stage 2 you now have the option to used master builders to become Tax Collector, which gives Tax exemption and also earns a sum equal to tax die roll, to visit France and claim the Saint Denis card, to visit the coast, which provides a sellers only market with prices 1 greater than the resource market on the main board. The final option is to visit Shiring to gain a prestige card, which will be one of the single or immediate use cards, which are now separated from the permanent ones which are available from Kingsbridge on the main board.
Also used in stage 2 is the master builder track. Only 2 builders for each player are now put in the bag at the start and when a player places his first master builder on the board, he also places his third master builder on the highest available space on the master builder track, when all the builders form the bag including those that passed have been placed on the board, the remaining builders are placed on the board in ascending order of the their place on the master builder track. This means that the first player to place a master builder will also be the last and will go some way toward mitigating lucky/unlucky draws from the bag. One thing I find interesting is that the English rules say to use this track with 5 or 6 players, which suggests that you don't when playing with less than that. I really can't see why it shouldn't be used with any number of players, although admittedly the competition for spaces including the 4 new ones will be reduced with 4 or fewer.
Stage 3 plays out much as before, the new areas are numbered 9a-e and are resolved following the King's Court and before the collection of craftsmen from Shiring.
For this play, Jeremy and Simon were completely new to the game, although Simon had just recently read the book, making him the only one of the five of us familiar with the source material. Mike, Steve and I had played the game before and were just new to the expansion. At the beginning Steve and I lagged behind and it was at this stage that I feel I lost it for the same reason as in my previous non expanded playing by not paying enough attention to acquiring extra craftsmen, this was not so for Steve who was building up to a good score, picking up the beggar which costs nothing and allows you to take a resource from the market before the cathedral scoring. Simon picked up the Toolmaker, but was then unable to get the metal he needed, which had been picked up by Mike. Mike spent most of the game picking up the metal from the King's court and sold most of it to fund other things.
In turn 2 Steve laid further foundations, acquiring the apprentice which increases the capacity of one of your other craftsmen by one, while Jeremy and Simon moved into the lead with Mike behind. On this turn a new event occurred allowing everyone to keep as many resources as they like between turns and both Steve & I declined to score points with our craftsmen that turn in the hope of being able to use them more efficiently next turn.
On turn 3, Steve was the first to use the St. Denis card, which essentially counts as an extra craftsmen, equivalent to any craftsman in play (owned by any player) with a capacity 1 less than that given on the card, so you can't use it for craftsmen with no capacity arrow, or those with capacity of 1. I had also hoped to go to France with my resource hoard from the previous turn, but Steve beat me to it.
For the remainder of the game we contrived to allow Steve to surge ahead, by letting him have access to France far too often, which he mostly used on Simon's sculptor, this combined with the apprentice and the fact that he had Jack allowing him to keep 6 craftsmen made for a good winning score. Jeremy remained steady for second place, while Simon fell away, Mike acquired the market warden on turn 5 giving a VP for each master builder at the market, but hardly anyone went there so this yielded very few VPs. I picked up Prior Philip on turn 4 but was blocked out of the priory too often to make much of an impression with him. I was able to scrape 3^rd place from Simon on the tie break. Overall the scores seemed low with the exception of Steve, when my first thought would have been to expect higher scores with the extra opportunities of the expansion, but this may have several explanations. Maybe we just let Steve have all the best opportunities so lost out, maybe with 5 players there is more spread of points or maybe taking advantage of the new opportunities means you forgo the original ones. I suspect all 3 are true, but further play will tell.
After the game there was discussion. Jeremy is fairly new to these sorts of games in general and limited himself to saying that he had enjoyed the evening. Simon was very impressed by the game, particularly the beautiful board, although he couldn't comment on the expansion alone having not played the base game. Mike is not the greatest fan of the base game and the expansion doesn't seem to have changed his view one way or the other. Steve on the back of a dominant victory loves the base game and the expansion has does nothing to change his opinion.
My own thoughts, this is a fine expansion for an already very good game and I can't really see any reason I would want to play without the expansion.
From my first impression the most interesting part are the new craftsmen cards, several of which are of different types to those in the basic game. In addition to those mentioned previously we have the brick maker who converts sand into stone and the tinsmith (available on turn 3) converting metal into 2 VP with a 2 capacity, potentially taking metal out of the game before the advent of the Bellmaker and Organ Builder on turn 6. The fact that not all the craftsmen will now appear in every game will bring more variety, particularly in games with less than 5 when only 2/3 will be in play. The new craftsmen are shown below.
On first impression of the new privilege cards, the only one to make an impression was William Hamleigh granting the use of the black master builder, which reserves a space for you to place on later. Simon used this to block me out of the priory late in the game. The others didn't really make an impression, although several were not in the game. These cards together with Inspiration in St. Denis and the new Gravel Pit shown below.
Of the new event cards, again none stood out other than as mentioned previously, but obviously again they will add more variety. One things that occurs to me is that there are now 7 good events and 7 bad events so it is possible (if unlikely) that all the events in a game will be good (or bad), I think it was an even split in our game. New events shown below.
The extension board is the most impressive part of the expansion, again beautifully painted by Michael Menzel. It fits so nicely with the existing board that it looks as if it was planned at the start (I'm not sure if that is in fact the case). The most significant place on the board at first sight seems to be France as the St. Denis card seems very powerful and in future games, I think we must make sure that no one player dominates this space (unless it's me of course). New board shown below.
So all in all a fine expansion to a game that I already love, which I rate at 8/10 like the base game.

Pillars of the Earth, The 120 mins
Player	Posn.	Points
Steve H	1	53
Jeremy	2	46
Dave D	3	44+
Simon	4	44
Mike	5	42

Over on the other table Dave & Ben indulged in the following, mostly picked up at Burton the weekend before.

Quinamid 15 mins
Player	Posn.	Points
Ben	1	6
Dave C	2	0

This seems to be a sort of 3D connect 4 with a pyramid of successively smaller boards which you can slide and rotate.

Ticket to Ride Card Game 55 mins
Player	Posn.	Points
Dave C	1	192
Ben	2	186

Simon brought this along and it's one I'd be interested to try myself although I'm not the greatest fans of the TtR board games.

Gheos 40 mins
Player	Posn.	Points
Dave C	1	85
Ben	2	26
Gheos 25 mins
Player	Posn.	Points
Ben	1	85
Dave C	2	23

I played this once at the club when Steve Paget brought it along and remember enjoying it.

It's Alive 20 mins
Player	Posn.	Points
Ben	1	58
Dave C	2	41

This is a quite limited production and Dave picked up one of the last copies at Burton. It seems to be quite well thought of on the geek, must give it a go some time.
That's all; I hope to post the 28 May report over the weekend if I have the chance given that it's Games Expo this weekend.

Session Summary – 14 May 2008

We had 7 this week and it was nice to see Simon again. The main game was Kremlin, for the second time this year, I think this was the first time we have played this more than once a year.
This was one of those games where nothing went right from my point of view. Everyone had influence in Nestor at the beginning of the game, although I never got round to declaring mine, when Mike revealed he had 6. He was able to get 2 waves by turn 3, when things turned in Steve's favour.
Steve started as he meant to go on with a reign of terror card and seemed to spend most of the game in control of the KGB head where he adopted the very even handed policy that anyone who he could influence he would purge. Siberia soon filled up and when the death toll also started to rise, we thought we might be in danger of an early finish due to insufficient people to fill the politburo. This was avoided by bring a few back from Siberia, while Steve moderated his policy a little. Steve seemed to be blessed with some great cards throughout the game, but it was not until the last third that he was really able to press home, achieving his winning third wave on the last turn.
I was seemingly in the situation where it always seemed that someone had a bit more influence than me in a particular politician. The exception was Viktor Wasolin who I had 10 in and I hoped for the chance to get him straight up to the KGB using a card to bypass the progress by age rule, but the opportunity never presented itself and it was not until the end of the game when I had 2 people who were potentially in a position to wield some power by which time it was far too late.
I suspect that Simon was also in a similar position and we both failed to get anyone to party chief let alone wave.

Kremlin 150 mins
Player	Posn.	Points
Steve H	1	3
Mike	2	2
Dave D	3=	0
Simon	3=	0

Over on the other table Dave, Ben and Alec played Power Grid, having been introduce to the game, they are mad keen on it like, I think, everyone else in the club and Dave had gone out and bought a copy. They played on the US map and the game was unfinished, probably because they had no experienced player in the game and also because of an interruption by someone whose name I don't recall (Steve knows him from Stourbridge Wargamers) looking for volunteers for the up and coming expo.

Power Grid 150 mins
Player	Posn.
Dave C	1=
Ben	1=
Alec	1=

Session Summary – 7 May 2008

5 this week with the return of Steve and we introduced Power Grid to Dave, Ben & Alec (although Dave has played once before, a long time ago). We played on the Benelux board, which I think is probably the ideal for the introduction of new players due to its low connection costs and rules for getting through the power plant deck quickly. Both of these will tend to shorten the game and counteract the longer time when several people haven't played before. We also used Power Plant deck 2.
This is a game where first time players do tend to be at a disadvantage and it is no real surprise that Steve & I came in first, but by the end of the game I think everyone was getting into the swing of things.
A few points of interest, there seemed to be no real completion for power plants, with the only real battle I can recall being between Alec & Ben for the 32 wind plant, which I went up to about 47. Dave and I had a brief skirmish over the 33 garbage plant, but I dropped out quite quickly and picked up the 21 plant which powered the same number of cities, albeit for one extra garbage, which had become quite cheap by that stage. Alec adopted an interesting green strategy and it was the first time I have ever seen a player go through the entire game without needing to buy raw materials and with Ben also trying to be green, this was enough to keep the fuel prices down (on the final turn I only needed to spend 5 on 2 uranium). I don't think Alec's strategy was a winning one but I think he could have done better than he did if he had not got himself boxed in with just 3 cities early in the game meaning he had to spend money jumping other players.
In the end I was just able to finish the game with no money remaining, but Steve had not got enough money to build to 15 as well, both of us had capacity to power 16. Everyone seemed to enjoy the game and Dave has since told me that Ben was especially taken by it and is on at Dave to get a copy as well.

Power Grid 120 mins
Player	Posn.	Points
Dave D	1	15
Steve H	2	14
Dave C	3	11
Ben	4	10
Alec	5	9

Until next Wednesday.

Session Summary – 30 April 2008

Just 4 of us this week, with Dave C, Ben and Alec, plus me. Steve was off seeing the Australian Pink Floyd, while Mike was also missing and I gather will be for the next meeting also.

Alec enjoyed himself last week and we introduced him to some more new games this week. First up was Ra, the first time we have played this since 2006. Alec wasted no time picking this up as the scores show, he amassed a lot of Pharaohs, giving him the majority in every epoch and scored well at the end with 2 sets of 3 of a kind monuments, plus 7 different ones.

I made most of my points with a set of 4 different civilisation in the first epoch and 3 different in the third, while Ben also scored a few with monuments. Dave spent most of the game battling with me to avoid being last in Pharaohs, with both of us failing and had the lowest Sun total at the end, while Ben & I tied for highest.

Ra 60 mins
Player	Posn.	Points
Alec	1	50
Dave D	2	40
Ben	3	32
Dave C	4	23

Next up was Scotland Yard (first play since 2004). I played Mister X, while Dave coordinated the detectives as Ben and Alec hadn't played before. I started south of the Thames and was able to reveal for the first time on a River stop, from that point I worked west and although the detectives got close after my second reveal, I was able to find my way to a tube station and use a double move to escape. They gave up the chase after I made my fourth reveal at a tube station and they were out of position and short of tickets.

Scotland Yard 50 mins
Player	Posn.
Dave D	1
Dave C	2=
Ben	2=
Alec	2=

Alec had a good time again and having seen it last week expressed an interest in playing Hamburgum. Unfortunately it is Steve P who has that so it is not available as often as some, but I am sure we can find others, such as Power Grid to introduce.

Session Summary – 23 April 2008

7 this week, it was good to see Steve Paget and I was somewhat surprised that he was without Gordon, who apparently was stuck into revision. We also welcomed Alec, a friend of Ben. We started with a 7 player game, Top Secret Spies (or Heimlich & Co).
We didn't remain 7 players for long as Dave had to drop out to go and pick Jenny up from the station, but that is not a problem with this kind of game. We played the basic game, which does not include the Top Secret cards, this resulting in a game that plays quickly but I suspect will always be decided in favour of the first player to be in the right position on their turn, which was the case for me in this game. The cards would add the chance of being able to do something clever on someone else's turn, but at the expense of taking a fair bit longer. I seem to remember this was the case on the one previous time we played the game, but I also seem to recall we didn't play it right, while not remembering the details.
I've included Dave in the scores, although he was missing for most of the game.

Top Secret Spies 20 mins
Player	Posn.	Points
Dave D	1	46
Dave C	2	36
Steve H	3	34
Ben	4	33
Alec	5	32
Steve P	6	27
Mike	7	23

After that we split 4 & 3, with Dave playing with Ben & Alec, while Steve introduced us to Hamburgum, a game I've been curious about. The idea in this one is to earn prestige through donations for the construction of Churches. The board is double sided with Hamburg on one side and London on the other; I can't imagine why the different sides should make a significant difference to the game as each just shows a network of buildings divided in 5 coloured areas, each of which also includes a church, but I may be wrong. There is also a cathedral, which is in a different coloured region on its own.
The game is one of gathering resources (beer, sugar and cloth), which can be sold either overseas through the use of ships or locally at a reduced price. The money so earned is used to buy building materials (bricks & wood) to build various buildings and also donate to the construction of the churches (the last donation to a church must also include a third material in the shape of a church bell).
On your turn you take an action, which is controlled by the rondel, first seen in Antike, showing the 7 possible actions with Trade represented twice. I will say here that while I don't dislike this game like Antike, I still fail to see the reason for this mechanism, beyond the introduction of a layer of needless complexity. 3 of the actions are to gather the various types of resources, the base being one unit but this can be increased by the construction of the appropriate type of building.
The trade action gives 2 options, you can either sell goods overseas, which requires you have at least 1 ship. Each ship will carry from 1 to 3 goods of the same type, depending on which dock it is in and goods sold in this way receive from £100 (at the start of the game, gradually falling to £50 as buildings for that type of good are constructed). If you can't load your goods on a ship, those left over can also be sold locally but this only gets you £30. The other trade option is to buy building materials (brick, timber and church bells) at a price based on the total number of all goods you buy (the price per good increase with the number purchased).
The church action allows the making of a donation or donations to a single church, the cost of which (in terms of materials and money increases with each successive donation). Each donation gains one of 5 bonus tiles for that church, which will gain the player prestige points, the first of these has to be one that earns a base 5 points, while the other 4 earn a variable number depending on a certain condition, such as the number of a particular type of building that the player has. A player may never have more than one of each type of tile active at any time, so if he acquires another he has to score at least one of them, even if they could possibly be worth more later on.
The shipyard action allows the expenditure of timber on buying ships, a new ship is placed into the 3 dock and if that dock is full the existing ships are all moved down to the next lower dock with those all ready in the 1 dock being scrapped.
The guildhall action lets you build buildings, each costing 1 timber and 1 brick, these must initially be linked either to one of your existing buildings or to a church that you have donated to, so you need to make at least one donation before building. You acquire master builder status when you complete a church allowing you to ignore this requirement from then on. Ownership of the buildings is marked by placing citizens on the map and there are 5 types, 3 of which increase your production of the 3 resources by 1 per building (and also reduce the price available from foreign markets), the others are official buildings which give money based on criteria depending on the building and the others are captains, which give you a new ship and also bring a neutral ship into play, which affects the existing ships in the same manner as any other ship.
The game ends with the completion of the sixth church at which points all VP tiles are scored together with 1 per £100 (goods and building materials convert into £50 each).
As to the game, Mike started followed by Steve H, then me. We all decided to start with a visit to Church to make a donation so we could get the building moving, while Steve P went for gathering more goods to make a bigger trade. In the early stages all the 5VP tiles were grabbed fairly quickly before we started on the variable bonus tiles. Steve H started building a large fleet, coming to the stage where he had all his ships on the board, at which point he was able to trade in a ship bonus tile he had together with another that he had just collected, which took us aback when we saw him collect what seemed to be a massive number of points, but it turned out that he was not able to gather many points elsewhere. I think he also probably spent more in jumping ahead on the Rondel than the rest of us.
I built a brewery early on and then set about gathering the materials necessary to complete the first church, this was delayed by a misunderstanding regarding the cost of the last donation, which I initially thought was based on the total number of buildings on the board, rather than the number of buildings I had myself. Thinking I was short on cash, I did another trip around the rondel, by which time we had the correct rule sorted out I thought at the time I may have done serious damage to my chances, but this was not the case. I spent much of the rest of the game finishing churches and ended up with 4 of the 6, gathering 9 VP tiles including 3 donation tiles, which I got the scoring wrong on as I thought they were based on the purely on the donations to that church rather than all donations. I scored the last one just before the end and we able to correct that one, but the other 2 were underscored by, I guess 5 or 6 points.
Steve P and Mike seemed to follow fairly balance strategies, with Steve collecting quite a few scoring tiles, while Mike completed the remaining 2 churches. At the end I am not sure whether that we counted the building materials when exchanging for money, at this point I discovered that I had a bit of cloth (a green block) which had got lost amongst the rest of my bits, so I didn't realise I had it. Also we had some discussion about the citizen tile from the cathedral, which I interpreted from the rules as applying to all citizens on the board since in every other case it is specifically noted that only your own are used. The others argued that that would make the tile too powerful, which I accepted despite the fact that that interpretation seemed to make it too weak as it only earned 1 per citizen, compared with 3 or 4 from the other churches. I did find confirmation from the designer afterward that my interpretation was wrong, he also commented that this tile would be more powerful with fewer players which is probably true.
There was of course some discussion after the game. This is a perfect information game with no randomness other than the player order determination and I felt the game was OK, but had a feeling that it was too dry; it gave me a bit of a Caylus feel although it should play a lot quicker than that game. Also the rondel is an unnecessary complication and I can't really see the reason why you shouldn't just be able to pick an action. Mike made comments about the game being like a multiplayer solitaire, which I just can't see as there seem to me to be numerous ways to affect your opponents, such as buying buildings you opponents want to fulfil their bonus tile requirements or the reverse of grabbling the bonus tiles they want. In addition, by building a ship at the right time you can damage their ability to trade by making their own ships move down a dock. Steve H demonstrated this in this game. The 2 Steves liked the game although Steve H did agree with me about the rondel.

Hamburgum 100 mins
Player	Posn.	Points
Dave D	1	78
Steve P	2	72
Mike	3	69
Steve H	4	57

Dave, Ben and Alec played Colossal Arena and Ave Caesar, scores below

Colossal Arena 40 mins
Player	Posn.	Points
Alec	1	12
Ben	2=	11
Dave C	2=	11
Ave Caesar 70 mins
Player	Posn.	Points
Alec	1	16
Ben	2	13
Dave C	3	10

This report delayed due to the excessive time I spent mulling what to say about Hamburgum, which I started to write about 10 days ago.