For the third week in a row, Combat Commander was on the table, although Steve and Donald have suggested that they will join the rest of us next week. They are obviously enjoying the game a lot. I got the impression when leaving on Wednesday that Steve was on for the win and I have included that in the records, I'm sure someone will chime in, if I've got this wrong.
Posn. | Player |
1 | Steve H |
2 | Donald |
That left Mike, me and Dave F and first we played San Marco. This is a game I have mixed feelings about, the card selection system is a wonderful idea and makes for some very hard decisions, the problem is that the cards to be selected from are totally random. I don't think this is such a problem with the action cards, but I think that the limit cards would be better if a fixed selection was available for allocation on each round eliminating the possibility of a mass of 3's appearing one round and a collection of 1's the next, both of which happened in this game we played. There is also the question of the random allocation of first chooser every turn, but my biggest issue is with banishments, which I find too potentially game breaking.
Despite my problems, this is a game I can probably be persuaded to play occasionally and I don't think anything happened in this one which would have changed the result.
Posn. | Player | Score |
1 | Mike | 65 |
2 | Dave D | 45+ |
3 | Dave F | 45 |
Next was Industrial Waste. I fell into a path of reducing the workforce early on and correspondingly used innovations (which seemed scarce in this game) to match those to allow me to produce orders. Unfortunately this meant I couldn't innovate on Waste production and had to take a risk when may waste snuck up to 9 (in the yellow) and then fell victim to an accident, this was immediately followed by another accident in the following turn, when I still hadn't been able to get the waste down.
Dave and Mike meanwhile pushed on with growth and the game ended quite quickly, although I somehow managed to stay with Mike and take second on the tie break for my second second place tie break of the evening.
Posn. | Player | Score |
1 | Dave F | 49 |
2 | Dave D | 34+ |
3 | Mike | 34 |
Nice one Dave F, winning Industrial Waste against such experienced players.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy San Marco but the banishments are harsh and go a good way to deciding the game. That said Mike's win rate is very high so it can't be all luck.
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ReplyDeleteCombat Commander was a whitewash unfortunately - one of those games where everything went right for one side (me) and everything wrong for the other. In a 2-player game that makes it a bit of a procession and consequently not the best fun for either party!
ReplyDeleteThat said, I think this game has a lot of potential, is playable in three hours-ish, has a top theme and despite the steep learning curve is not over-complex. We need to give it a few more tries I think, in the hope of getting a close game. Not this week though! :)
I am not a fan of deep simulation wargames as they feel as if two military history buffs met up in a pub, one of them a barrister and the other a statistician, and decided over a large amount of beer that they could develop a game, each of them using their 'strengths' to make sure there is clarity and realism. To me, that's not the point. Rules that come in tomes rather than booklets suck all the fun out for me. I like games where the rules are quite simple, without great lists of conditions, exceptions or huge statistical look-up tables. This does not mean I don't like complex games, but that the complexities I prefer are in the player's choices: it's clear what the options are, but the difficulty is in choosing.
ReplyDeleteIn contrast to most wargames, CC:E is not a one that feels like it was developed by the usual suspects. No, CC:E feels like it was developed by a programmer of object-oriented code with lots and lots of nested loops and switches, many of them triggered by randomised conditions. The play is not linear, but conditional and full of dependencies.
I think it's good, but last week's game was a disaster for me. Steve's basic strategy was much better than mine, but the cards ran against me too, to such a degree that I didn't so much as tickle even one of his units. Now, Steve plays this game much better than me and pointed out some of my mistakes – giving Orders to Fire when Fire as an Action is much more economical for the defender – but much of the time I had nothing to work with. It is difficult to give reaction fire when your only possible fire action is conditional on your units being Ordered to move. If it's not my turn, I can't give Orders, therefore I can't fire. This was extremely frustrating for me.
I do need to understand the game better, and be a bit more tuned-in to the subtleties of the different card sections. I'm down but not out, and shall return stronger!