Session Report 18 February 2009

Half term this week and Dave was running a large Corporation adventure in the bar downstairs for the younger members. He has written what seems to be a quite extensive write up of the goings on, which you can read if you go over here.
That left 7 of us to split 3 & 4. Andy, Steve H & I played Sumeria, this is a prototype of a new game, due to be released at this year's UK Games Expo, which Andy is play testing. The nominal theme of the game is that players are putting traders into 8 city states in a effort to gain control of them (via a simple area majority), but there is the added twist that the value of the states varies with time due to the fact that every time a trader is placed in a state, its prestige is increased and it displaces the state immediately above it. Only the 3 most prestigious sates pay out each time, with the first and second place players receiving cardboard chits, labelled with 1 of 4 letters (which I can't now remember, but I gather they represent something) and after they pay out, these 3 states are moved to the back of the list, with the highest becoming last for the next turn, so if you win the most valuable state, then you will have to do more work to get it back up the order. This seems a genuinely nice mechanism. At the end if the game, you score points based on the number of each type of chit that you have collected, the scoring for each type going up in a triangular series from the third onwards so it is an advantage to try and concentrate on particular letters, rather than spreading your collection over all type.
As to the game play, I ended up screwing up right at the beginning, having forgotten the business of upgrading the states where you place a trader and ended up downgrading the area where I had most strength and things went downhill from there, as I said it's a nice mechanism but not a type that I enjoy very much. Steve however picked it up straight away and won quite well.
At the end Andy asked for scores out of 10, which I had to think about, coming to the conclusion that as a game, it'd probably be 7, but on the geek rating scheme (indicating willingness to play), it would be no more than 4. This is based on the fact that I just didn't enjoy it much, the theme is so thin as to be nonexistent, it could easily be a simple abstract, or have many other different themes pasted on without any need to change anything else, i.e. Rename the city states as Star Systems and the game will work just as well with a Science Fiction theme. Regarding the existing theme, I know pretty much nothing about that, but Steve and Andy were suggesting that the people of these states were more likely to be hacking each other up with swords, rather than indulging in trading. I also thought there may be an issue if the total number of turns is not a multiple of the number of players as there is a clear advantage to placing last in a turn. I don't know whether the number of turns is varied to take this into account, but I got the impression that this was not the case.

Sumeria 50 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Steve H	39
2	Andy	29
3	Dave D	15

After that we went for a game of Power Grid, choosing the Benelux board with the central 3 areas (with the lowest connection costs) to allow for the quickest possible game.
Everyone did pretty well, getting up to 17 cities, although I ended up last which was a bit irritating as I could have boosted my capacity to 18 on the last turn by buying the 46 plant, but dropped out of the auction, giving the plant to Steve, by forgetting that the 2 northern cities that I had access to (I was building first) had the 15 value spot available, rather than the 20 values. This meant I could have afforded to bid 10 higher, which apparently would have been enough to force Steve out. Andy would still have won, but I would have been second. Oh well.

Power Grid 90 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Andy	18+
2	Steve H	18
3	Dave D	17

Over on the other table, the game was Container, I gather with the expansion, scores as follows.

Container 160 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Gordon	133
2	Paul	126
3	Steve P	~90
4	Steve Pe	~75