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