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.

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

 

Session Report 11 February 2009

We had our largest attendance of the year so far on Wednesday with Gordon and Steve Paget attending for the first time and we split into 2 groups of 5. On one table we had Power Grid, most played game at the club for the last 2 years and also overall (since records began), but it has a big margin to make up this year if it is to overhaul Battlestar Galactica, which I suspect will get a bit more play yet before the year is out.
This game was played on the Korea map, which we had only played once before and the players were myself, Andy, Simon and the 2 Bens. It was Ben T's first game of Power Grid. We excluded the purple area on the middle of the west side, which meant the 4 areas of Seoul with zero connections between them, together with the 3 other adjacent cities with low cost were all out and we were left with the 2 northern areas and 2 southern areas with a narrow corridor which narrowed to one city wide (Wonsan) at the north end linking the 2.
I don't seem to have great recall of much of the game (especially what was going on in the south of the map), but giving a short description of the play, I set up in the North West, taking Anju and Pyeongyang, having bought with Andy occupying Wonsan to block the north of the eastern corridor. Simon was as the South of the corridor, while the 2 Bens set up in the wide open spaces of South Korea.
I would have been happy to stay in step 1 for a bit, having built to 6 cities, being able to power them with the 31 (1 Nuclear for 5) and the 11 (Wind power), but things worked out quite well as people also built 6 cities and Andy bought the 32 plant, so that when Ben C triggered step 2, I was low enough in the order and had accumulated enough money to immediately build down the corridor to Chungju giving me access to the cities in the south and also taking Hamheung to make it very expensive for anyone other than me to build into the northern cities where only Andy was currently. This was actually one more city than I could power, but I thought that I could afford the extra city for the sake of board position as I had no serious resource problem, both Uranium and Trash (for the 27 plant) being reasonably priced in the Southern market.
The following turn I did not buy a plant or build, but had bought 2 nuclear to give me flexibility in the resource market on the next turn, which I knew should be the last (I may have been potentially vulnerable here if anyone had been able finish the game as my capacity had fallen behind several people). Several people built past me to 12 and this caused the 12 plant to be discarded from the market and triggered step 3.
The next turn was the final one and, I was 4^th I think in the turn order and was able to sit back and wait for a plant to drop at the end of the auction phase, I picked up the number 46 (2 coal 7 cities) which gave me 16 capacity and I was able to build this number of cities. Andy and Ben C finished on 15 with Ben winning the tie break, Simon was on 13 with Ben T on 12.
The set up we used worked to my advantage as Andy & I essentially had the North to ourselves and the north east area was very useful, although it caused Ben C problems when he started there in the first game we played on this map.

Power Grid 130 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Dave D	16
2	Ben C	15+
3	Andy	15
4	Simon	13
5	Ben T	12

After Power Grid the Colosseum game was still going, Andy and Ben T left at this point, while Ben C and I introduced Dominion to Simon. We played using the started combination of cards and it was a close game. Simon had some trouble getting money into his hand early on but was able to buy some Duchies and came on well towards the end to give a close finish. I think he enjoyed the game.

Dominion 35 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Dave D	40
2=	Simon	36
2=	Ben C	36

Over on the other table, Gordon won the game of Colosseum. This is a game that I did play once last year and was underwhelmed and I gather that Dave was not that impressed. It seems to be the way of things with me and Days of Wonder games, all those I have played (that is Ticket to Ride (and TtR Europe), Cleopatra and the Society of Architects, Pirates Cove and this) have seemed to me to be very flashy and over produced affairs, but deeply disappointing as games. This is why I am somewhat concerned as to how the upcoming Small World will turn out, I hope it is good and will probably end up buying it, but I wish it was any other publisher than Days of Wonder.

Colosseum 150 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Gordon	81
2	Steve H	77
3	Steve P	71
4	Mike	62
5	Dave C	49

Session Report 4 February 2009

We had 7 this week and split 4 & 3. Steve, Mike, Ben T & I played Battlestar Galactica again and I continued my run of never being on the winning side, although I'm no longer worried about being a Cylon all the time as I've now been human 3 in a row.
This was a 3 player game with me as Laura Roslin, Mike as Boomer, Steve as Tom Zarek (that's 3 times I think, I wonder what affinity Steve has with shady politicians) and Ben as Colonel Tigh. So I was president and Ben was Admiral.
Things went well for the humans in the early part of the game with no Cylons to disrupt progress, so much so that a certain human saw fit to create a bit of dissention themselves. This was Tom Zarek who decided he wanted to be president and so went to Administration and called an election to take the office from me. He won of course, being a politician he had the right mix of skills for the check and I didn't because I was also a politician and all my cards supported the check. So Zarek became president, but the problem was that on my turn, I moved to Administration and held another election, but now I held the cards that I couldn't use on the previous check and so won the office back. We had now played quite a few of our good cards and it was just as well there were no cylons about. Later in this phase I had the chance to look at Zarek's loyalty card and he was human, but the cylon detector must have been malfunctioning.
Just before the jump which triggered the sleeper phase, a crisis occurred that could have dropped one of the resources (food I think) into the red and we discussed whether we should let it drop so insuring that the sympathise would support humanity, we decided not (big mistake). The sleeper phase arrived, Boomer was the sympathise and headed off to the cylon fleet where she spent her time on the Caprica location hitting us with crises, which soon resulted in nearly all the available cylon ships congregating around Galactica, after that is, she gave her 2 remaining loyalty cards to Tigh, so there I was, knowing I was human, but looking at an Admiral with 4 loyalty cards, the problem was neither he nor Zarek did anything that convinced me that they were definitely a cylon and although I had the Arrest order Quorum card and could throw either of them in the brig, I knew that if I made the wrong choice, the situation could be even worse.
Eventually we got to the situation where we were 1 away from Kobol and at -3 on the jump track and 2 fuel left, we would be OK if we didn't lose more than one fuel, we had plenty of population, and could have jumped again at -3 after reaching distance 8. I thought we had a good chance but it turned out that both of the destinations drawn (as revealed afterwards) lost us 2 fuel, so the Cylons won again.
It was revealed after that although Tigh had 4 loyalty cards, it was Zarek who was the Skinjob.

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

Over on the other table, Dave, Ben & Simon played Tinners' Trail and Galaxy Trucker.

Tinners' Trail 60 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Dave C	88
2	Simon	76
3	Ben C	74
Galaxy Trucker 70 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Ben C	64
2	Dave C	14
3	Simon	9