Session Report 18 March 2009

With 5 players this week, I brought Richard Denning's Great Fire prototype back to the table. This is due to be demonstrated at the upcoming UK Games Expo, by myself amongst others.
The first time I played the game, the spread of the fire was to the west as is to be expected given the mix of cards, but in all the more recent games we have tended to see a spread to the North and East. I don't see how this may be some kind of strange group think amongst ourselves, because most of the people I have played the game with have been new to it (3 in this case), but we do seem to find a concentration of trained bands in the West, together with a reluctance to play cards for that direction early on.
Anyway that was the pattern for this game, the Tower of London went up in smoke quite early (taking with it most of its demolition charges) and from there the fire spread North up through the Duke's Palace and turned west at the top of the board taking out Anton's Yard and almost reaching the Artillery Grounds by the end of the game. To the west of Pudding Lane the fire spread slowly engulfing Bread St and the areas to its west, but failing to reach St. Pauls, much to Paul's disappointment as he displayed a great aptitude as a pyromaniac and had been keen to burn the Cathedral from the beginning. In the North West the Guild Hall survived despite my best efforts (although the regions on several sides were ablaze), I had been keen to have it burn having earlier failed in my efforts to preserve the Royal Exchange (losing 6 points).
Steve Perkins succeeded in winning the Hero of London award with 6 fires extinguished, having held it since its first award; he was also the only one to keep all his bonus locations intact (including the Guild Hall) and ended up winning from Steve H, who had lost out due to the conflagration at the Tower. All enjoyed the game and at the end agreed that this was a good fun game with a theme that should have wide appeal, being a widely known historical event. The only slight concern, expressed by Paul, was that there might be too many trained bands available allowing the fire to be too closely controlled in the early stages. The problem is reducing the number may allow the first to run completely out of control. A possibility we thought may be in having fixed starting positions for the trained bands or maybe requiring the players to make one of their placements on the North, East or West edges of the board, allowing more scope for spread before they could be properly brought into play. It does occur to me that the number of trained bands might be better fixed rather than depending on the number of players, as the number of houses on the board is also fixed rather than variable.

Great Fire 90 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Steve Pe	53
2	Steve H	50
3	Dave D	45
4	Paul	42
5	Mike	41

 
Next game on the table was Nottingham. This seemed an unusual play of this game with the conclusion coming by the play of the all the missions available before the Sheriff got more than about a third of the way to Nottingham. Only 2 other sets were played throughout the game. I think one reason for this was, probably, the number of ambushes that were set up deterring people from trying for sets of 3. I had 4 of these in front of me thinking I would be able to collect good cards by ambushing other people, it didn't work out like that and it would probably have been better had I simply taken the '9' cards into my hand when I had the opportunity and made a set of them.

Nottingham 30 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Steve H	60
2	Steve Pe	42
3	Paul	38
4	Dave D	36
5	Mike	25

 
Finally there was time for a quick round of Tsuro, Paul winning by staying alive just long enough for the rest of us to fall off the board.

Tsuro 10 mins.
Posn.	Player
1	Paul
2	Mike
3	Dave D
4	Steve H
5	Steve Pe

Session Report 11 March 2009

6 this week spread over 2 tables; I played Stone Age with Gordon and Steve P. This is a game that I have been interested in playing for a long time, having seen it often compared to Pillars of the Earth, which is a game I love.
This was a first game for me of course and I had no real idea of what I was doing. I ended up pursuing a strategy of collecting the different symbols on the cards, together with various other bits and pieces. I succeeded in collecting 7 out of the 8 symbols, but still ended up last. I suppose I wasn't too far behind Gordon considering the scale of the points in the game, but Steve won by a street.
I have to say that having played the game, I was not impressed by that first play. My biggest problem was the use of the dice, there were too many times when improbably low rolls affected things (it has to be said I was not alone in being affected like this, so it probably evened out), we had 2 occasions when 3 1's were rolled on 3 dice. The other thing seemed to me to be the theme and the lack of build up in the game. In Pillars of the Earth you are building a Cathedral and as the game goes on you have access to better resources in the way of craftsmen resulting in acceleration towards a climax as the game reaches its fixed end point. To consider other "worker placement" games, in Agricola you are building the most efficient farm at a fixed end point, I can see this them. Even in Caylus I can recognise the fact that you are building a castle and there is build up as better buildings become available, although Stone Age (to give it its due) does not have the same soporific quality that Caylus does. In Stone Age all I see is you doing the same things again & again until someone chooses to end the game (or it is forced), admittedly you improve slightly having more tools and perhaps more people, but there seems to be no real acceleration. I suppose that the Victory point allocations are supposed to represent the improvement of your tribe, but they all seem so abstract to me (it may just be me) compared with the building you are doing in the other games.
That said it does look beautiful (although not as much, I think, as the same artist's work on Pillars of the Earth), if someone were to give me a copy of the game I would consider framing the board to hang on the wall, I don't think I would play it.

Stone Age 90 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Steve P	224
2	Gordon	173
3	Dave D	156

 
Over on the other table, Simon, Andy & Mike played the aforementioned Agricola and we somewhat surprised that they finished just before we finished Stone Age. This was won by Simon in what seems a very low scoring game. Simon declared that it was his first win at the club, which I found somewhat surprising and I see that I have records of him winning at St. Petersburg and Taj Mahal in July 2005, unless there is another Simon that I don't remember.

Agricola 90 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Simon	31
2	Mike	23
3	Andy	20

 
After Agricola, they grabbed my copy of Dominion and had a couple of games.

Dominion 25 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Mike	29
2	Simon	27
3	Andy	26
Dominion 25 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Simon	42
2	Mike	37
3	Andy	29

 
I had been thinking that Dominion would be in order after our Stone Age game, but in its absence we plumped for Pandemic, being the only 3 player suitable game on hand in the time scale. It should be noted that Gordon is not really a great fan of cooperative games, but he was willing in this case. We played with 5 epidemics; I was the Scientist, Gordon the Dispatcher and Steve the Operations Expert.
During the course of the game, both Steve & I discovered mistakes we had been making in the past. He in not knowing that sharing knowledge can be done in either player's turn, not just in the turn of the player giving the card. In my case I had previously missed the fact that when treating a cured disease, any player (rather than just the medic) can remove all the cubes of a cured disease in the city.
As often seems to happen in this game, we felt we were in with a good chance, only needing to get round to Gordon's turn to cure the Yellow disease and win, only to be defeated by a chain of outbreaks in the previously cured Black disease. There goes the World again. It is a quirk of my system that the table below lists everyone as equal first despite the fact that we all lost.

Pandemic 45 mins.
Posn.	Player
1=	Gordon
1=	Steve P
1=	Dave D

Session Report 4 March 2009

With 5 in attendance we played another game of Battlestar Galactica.
Dave picked first going for Laura Roslin and so becoming President. Ben followed and went for William Adama to be Admiral. That left Steve with the choice of a pilot or the Chief, which would be a change for him either way as he has previously always played a politician. He plumped for Starbuck and that gave Mike a free choice of the remaining characters. Mike went with Helo and that left me without the choice of a military leader, I decided on Baltar, this being the first time I have repeated a character.
Loyalty cards were dealt out, I of course got 2 being Baltar and one of them revealed that I was a Cylon. Not having any special abilities, that would help in sabotaging the human cause, I sat back and for the most part did my best to help as little as possible, by holding back on playing my best skill cards except where it was obvious the humans would win and also holding back on the playing of investigative committees. I also manage to surreptitiously sabotage a couple of skill checks. I thought I might be found out at one point as Roslin got the chance to check one of my loyalty cards, but fortunately picked the wrong one.
By the time the sleeper phase came around, I had almost convinced myself that Roslin was the other Cylon in the game as Dave would pick 2 crises according to his special ability and choose one that seemed too bad for the humans, with the comment that the other one was even worse. This, to me, happened too often to be a coincidence and so on my first turn after the rest of the loyalty cards were dealt, I used my once per game ability to look at Dave's cards. Sure enough he was a Cylon so I knew who my ally was, although apparently he had only just been dealt the card, so he had genuinely believed that the crises he discarded were worse than the ones he chose. If so the humans could have very badly off if they had been played. I of course declared that Roslin was human and plat moved on.
On my following turn, I came to the conclusion, that the Cylon cause could use a boost and revealed myself as a Cylon, throwing Starbuck in the brig from her Viper, there then followed some resetting of the board as I realised that my Cylon cards was the one lowering Morale, I was getting confused because the card I had seen in Dave's hand was the Brig one. My revealing, of course, had the disadvantage that it would cast suspicion on Dave (I having declared him human), but it seemed that no one was absolutely certain, Adama also coming under suspicion because of the destination cards chosen. I think the Admiral will always come under suspicion for this reason, although Ben hadn't done anything to convince me he was a Cylon (which he couldn't be of course).
When I got my first chance to use the Cylon locations, the Galactica had recently jumped into a Cylon ambush and I played my massive attack super crisis. In the ensuing fighting 3 civilian ships were destroyed for the loss of 2 population, unfortunately one of the civilian ships had no effect. It was during all this that Roslin also revealed, I think that of Dave hadn't then he may well have been in the brig by his next turn. As it was he threw Adama in the brig so the Admiral title passed to Helo, but by way of compensation Adama became president despite his incarceration.
The president remained locked up for the rest of the game, with the Cylons eventually emerging victorious by reducing morale to zero. It was my first time on the winning side.

Battlestar Galactica 160 mins.
Posn.	Player
1=	Dave C
1=	Dave D
3=	Ben C
3=	Steve H
3=	Mike

Session Report 25 February 2009

Just the three of us this week, quite a comedown after recent times. The whole evening was devoted to Dominion, this being Steve H's introduction to the game.

The first game we played with the recommended selection for beginning players. This was quite a close game won by Mike. Steve did not do so well in the early stages with Mike and I picking up a few provinces, while he was unable. He did come back later on however and finished with a respectable score having picked up a few duchies along the way.

Dominion 40 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Mike	30
2	Dave D	27
3	Steve H	24

The second game was a long one; we played with a random selection, notable amongst which was the Thief, with no Moat in play to counter it. When we started picking these up, everyone followed suit and in the early part of the game Mike and Steve seemed to suffer greatly as their Silvers found their way into my deck, while Coppers ended up in the trash. I guess I thought I was "lucky" as this seemed to work to my benefit and I resisted when Steve in particular was intimating we abandon the game on the basis that it was likely to go on forever. As it turned out, things worked against me as my deck became horribly bloated and I seemed to be drawing either hands full of actions which I couldn't use as the selection was lacking in extra action cards or treasure cards, which weren't enough to afford a province. Meanwhile Steve and later Mike with few treasures used the Adventurer to great effect. In the end Steve won well from Mike, while I ended up last with a deck far too full of treasure. I must re-evaluate my use of the thief in future (this was the first game I've played where they have been used) and must remember how useful the Adventurer turned out to be.

Dominion 60 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Steve H	55
2	Mike	37
3	Dave D	30

 

Finally we used the selection labelled Size Distortion from the rulebook. This time the thieves were not in evidence, although Witches were and the curses were soon flying about. I had a chance to try to use the chapel to slim down my deck, but this did not really work initially as the curses built up. In the end I ended up buying multiple chapels and by the end of the game all but 4 of the chapels in the game had been trashed. I tried to keep to the idea of keeping my deck fairly slim, while late in the game Mike & Steve made half hearted attempts at Garden strategies but too late for them to accumulate enough of them to make the difference. I ended up with half the provinces and that was enough to win the closest game of the evening.

Dominion 40 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Dave D	41
2	Steve H	38
3	Mike	37

 

 

I think what all these games showed was how we are all novices. This was Steve's first experience, Mike hasn't played that many games and although I have played a few more, most of those have been with the suggested beginners selection and I still have very little or no experience with many of the other cards.