A few folks over for games: Medici, Incan Gold, and Cutthroat Caverns

I am getting embarrasingly far behing on my blog. Therefore, I'm going to give a bunch of rapid, brief thoughts as fast as I can to catch myself up. Also going to be doing away with the scores unless I actually have something interesting to say about that particular play (which is getting hard to do with these games I played almost a month ago).

To start, had a few folks over on Saturday the 19th to watch the Cal-Minnesota game and play some games. Ah those heady times before we realized Cal was about to crater. Anyway, here's what we played:

Medici

This was my first play of Medici. It has a lot in common with Ra, which is one of my favorite games. Aside from having the same designer (Teutonic funboy Reiner Knizia) they are both auction games that take place over 3 rounds where the lots being auctioned start to have differing values to different players as the game progresses. I thought it was all right, but I can't help but compare it to Ra and I feel Ra is the better game. The push-your-luck element in Ra is a lot more nail-bitey and the fact that you are bidding for power (or lack thereof) in future auctions in Ra make it feel a lot more interesting to me. Of course its entirely possible that if I had played many games of Medici in the past and just now learned Ra I'd be saying just the opposite.

Incan Gold

Another one I finally played for the first time. This is a game that often comes up when people are looking for a quick, easy to teach game that can be played with a larger group of players (it plays up to 8). In Incan Gold (originally released in German as Diamant), players are exploring a ancient ruin and finding gems in varying quantities and also ancient relics. Each turn, each player makes a binary decision - with apologies to The Clash, should I stay or should I go? If players go, they get to keep the money they have found so far. If they stay, they get to keep exploring, but along with the treasure cards, there are also hazards, and if 2 of the same type of hazard card are revealed, any players still in the ruin lose everything they have. 6 rounds of this and the game is done.

We played 2 7-player games of this. It took 10 minutes to teach and the games took 15-20 minutes each. There are a few other press-your-luck games that play about that quickly (Can't Stop, Double or Nothing), but the simultaneous action in Incan Gold makes it work really well with even 7 or 8 players.

Cutthroat Caverns

This ended up being a bit of a dissapointment. I'd played this once at a game meetup and really enjoyed it. It's a game of happy-go-lucky kill stealing, as players are exploring a dungeon and encountering various creatures and traps. They have to work together to defeat them, but only the player who strikes the killing blow gets any points.

After my first very positive experience, I went out and spent $80 to get the game and all three expansions. I attempted to play it, and it was very long and often frustrating. A couple of reasons why I think that happened:

*I tried to play with all the expansions at once. This is a game where every card and power basically "breaks the rules" of the game. Trying to deal with so many exceptions when we were all new to the game led to quite a few rule disputes and the rules were sometimes unclear - especially when different cards from the expansions interacted.

*We played with 6 people. That's the most the game can play with. In a game that emphasizes people messing each other up, having 5 other people who are all trying to interfere with you basically made the game feel like a complete crapshoot as each player who was trying to do something was stuck in a 1-vs.-5 fight to do it. I think this game probably works best with 3 or 4.

There was consensus that we'd probably bitten off more than we could chew, and I think I could probably get most of the folks who struggled through the ~3 hour experience to try it again (though maybe not all at once).