23 December - No Meeting

Owing to snow fall tonight's meeting is cancelled. I'm trying to get in touch with most people. Merry Christmas to All.

Session Report – 18, 25 November 2009

18 November

With 5 players, we all played on the same table. First was Small World using Andy's copy, adding in the 2 new expansions based on a competition for user submitted content. There are interesting new ideas here but nothing that really makes the game any better or worse than before. It is still a reasonable reimplementation of Vinci, but seems to be inferior due to the dumbing down of the basic mechanics of its predecessor, while at the same time complicating many of the special powers, the simplicity of which was one of the strengths of the original game.

This game was a close contest except for Mike who suffered from my use of Ransacking Kobolds, Ransacking is a new power, which allows you to take points off someone else and Mike suffered the misfortune in having his territory arranged in such a way as to make the most inviting target and so earning the most points, rather than attacking a player further up the order who would not yield such a great bounty. I don't think there is anything wrong with the idea of this sort of power per se, it does not lead to the controlling player earning excessive points, but I do wonder if there is a problem in that it is the only such power available, possibly leading to the situation where one player suffers disproportionately.

Small World 120 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Andy	89
2	Donald	84
3	Dave D	82+
4	Dave F	82
5	Mike	53

After that there was time for a game of Nottingham, which was possibly the closest I have seen for this game.

Nottingham 40 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Donald	88
2	Mike	87
3	Dave D	86
4	Dave F	74

25 November

Newcomer Andrew joined us this week, along with the crew from Telford, Paul bringing with him my copy of Middle Earth Quest. We split into 2 groups, with Battlestar Galactica on one table, Power Grid on the other, played on the Brazil map. I joined the BSG game, but it was a tough decision.

We played BSG using the full Pegasus expansion with the option of a Cylon Leader. The characters were myself – Ellen Tigh, Andy – William Adama, Andrew – Starbuck, Steve H – Leoben, Mike – Laura Roslin. With Steve taking on a Cylon leader, this meant there would be only 1 secret cylon and I received this card on the first deal, but decided that I would take special care to try to avoid drawing suspicion to myself with the hope of pulling off the win by a premature jump away from New Caprica.

Steve received the "Show Their True Nature" agenda requiring that the cylons win and that he be incarcerated at game end or he has been executed at least once. He accomplished this part of the agenda by making no pretence at helping the humans by sending some Civilian ships to their doom by using Communications, which got him thrown in the brig in short order at which time President Roslin ordered him executed using a Quorum card. Having achieved that part of the agenda things initially went well as population tumbled approaching New Caprica, but he was somewhat worried at the apparent absence of his secret ally.

New Caprica was reached with few Civilian ships to evacuate and all had already launched by the time Galactica returned. When it finally got round to my turn I was just about able to force the cylon win, by seizing the Admiral's title from Helo (this was Andy, Adam's execution having been earlier ordered by Roslin in response to a crisis) using Ellen's once per game power. Morale was on 3 and there were 3 humans still on the ground, if I had been delayed another turn, one of the humans would have moved off the surface and the plan would have failed, which suggests to me that this tactic is not the all powerful automatic win that it is made out o be in certain quarters.

Battlestar Galactica 160 mins.
Posn.	Player
1=	Dave D
1=	Steve H
3=	Mike
3=	Andrew
3=	Andy

Over on the other table, the result was as below, I have no further details. We still must get the Spanish board on the table with its strange nuclear surge in step 2.

Power Grid 130 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Steve Pe	17
2	Dave F	16
3	Paul	15+
4	Nigel	15

Session Report – 11 November 2009

6 players and a 3-3 split. On one table we played a couple of games of Power Grid-Factory Manager (hereinafter referred to as Factory Manager), the new game by Friedemann Friese.

I will admit that the association of Power Grid with this game is what attracted my attention to it, but reading about it made it sound interesting and I decided to buy. Although the game has very little in common with the earlier game, it plays quicker and provides an interesting game in what should be about half the time.

The game is unusual (or at least it seems so to me) among many modern games in that it is won simply by having the most money, without having any systems to earn Victory points. It is played over 5 rounds, all of which follow the same pattern.

1. First there is a turn order auction, which is the only real similarity I see to Power Grid, other than the artistic style. You bid for tiles which have a number from 1 to 12, the player order will then run from lowest to highest, with the higher numbers having a discount on purchases for that turn to compensate for acting later in each phase.
   Bids are made using workers and because each player only starts with 7, with the potential to hire a maximum of 2 seasonal workers, the auction does not take long, with positions often being sold for nothing, since workers used in the auction are unavailable for other tasks later in the turn.
   
2. Once turn order has been determined, each player in turn must add tiles to the market according to the number of workers they have available (which must be a minimum of 1), the last player also has the chance to move a number of extra tiles (depending on the number of players into the market). These tiles represent machines that produce goods, together with storage for those goods, robots (which increase a machine's production or decrease its manpower requirement) and control and optimisation systems which reduce energy requirements together with increasing production and/or reducing manpower requirements.
   The tiles are laid out on a display and the cheapest of each type must be brought into the market before more expensive tiles of the same type, so it is an interesting situation if you are early in the turn order as you may have to bring down cheap tiles in the hope that those later in the order will being down the more expensive tiles of that type that you may want to buy. Conversely if you are later in the order, you may be able to bring down the tiles you want, but run the risk that someone earlier in the order may buy them before you get the chance.
   
3. Next is the purchase of new tiles and placement in the factory, together with the removal of existing tiles. Again you need workers for this, 1 worker to buy a tile, 1 worker to remove a tile. The cost of a tile is the number printed on it, less any discount that you may have due to you turn order tile. It is that this stage, following all other actions that you can hire seasonal workers, which will be usable until this stage next turn at the cost of 7 each, again less turn order discount.
   The reason you may want to remove existing tiles is due to limitations of space, the factory can hold a maximum of 10 machines robots and storage tiles (increasable to 12, by paying 10 per space) and 1 each of control and optimisation systems.
   
4. In practice, this phase of the game has tended to be merged into phase 3 in the games I've played, with players moving straight on to carry out the necessary changes needed to their factories as soon as they have bought tiles, while the next player carries out their phase 3. This speeds the game up, but Strictly speaking all players should complete phase 3 before the first player moves on to phase 4.
   In this phase players decide which of their machines/robots are used and adjust their production storage and energy tracks, at the same time setting aside the necessary workers to operate the factory in the canteen. These workers will not be available in the following turn for bidding or use in phases 2 and 3. Finally after all players have made the necessary adjustments, the energy price rise (from 0 to 2) will be revealed.
   
5. In this phase, players collect income which is determined by the lower of production and storage less the cost of energy determined by the amount used multiplied by the cost determined in phase 4. The income is doubled in the final round, so this is something to bear in mind.
   

I like this game, it is different to Power Grid and I have heard some people say they like it more, while others prefer the former game. I'm not yet willing to say I like it as much as Power Grid, that is one of my favourite games and I do have slight doubts as to the replayability of this one, although it has to be said that here has been plenty of variety in the games I have played so far, with some games where a lot of people go for a lot of machines, compared with other where robots are much in demand and further variation in whether people go for production robots or personnel robots. There has also been variation in demand for optimisation/control tiles. The one thing you can guarantee that will be wanted is storage.

This variation has possibly been driven by the fact that the low end of each type of tile is maybe not very good and if no one is prepared to bring the lesser value tiles into the market, then the higher value ones never get bought, although it is possible to move past the lower end tiles without buying them if players cooperate. It is possible that a more predictable pattern will appear with more play, but that remains to be seen, I think there is a fair bit of life in this.

Our 2 games this Wednesday were markedly different; the first was very close, suing the beginners' rule, which sets energy cost increase to zero in the first round. In the second game, the energy cost went up by 2 in the first round and I made the mistake of thinking that that meant it went from 1 to 3, in fact the 2 is a column shift on the table, so the rise should have only been to 2. This was combined with Donald having done a better job of controlling his energy use on the first round than Steve and even more so than me and as a result, it was something of a runaway. I played a further 4 more games at Midcon, some with, some without the beginners rule and all were close, interestingly they also tended to be higher scoring than these 2 games, although this may have been connected to all being played with 4 or 5 players.

Factory Manager 75 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Dave D	178
2	Donald	172
3	Steve H	148
Factory Manager 60 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Donald	238
2	Steve H	195
3	Dave D	122

Over on the other table, 3 different games were played.

Caylus Magna Carta 80 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Mike	46
2	Julian	41
3	Dave F	39
San Juan 40 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Mike	37
2	Dave F	28
3	Julian	14
Katzenjammer Blues 20 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Mike	6
2	Julian	4
3	Dave F	0