I went to the every-other-Sunday game day at Zephyr cafe on Easter Sunday. Due to what was probably a combination of the holiday and rainy weather, there were just two other people there, James and Kent.
Chris 33, James 21, Kent 19
They had already pulled out Kent's copy of Kingsburg, which was a game I'd been wanting to try for a while, so I was more than happy to join in.
Kingburg is a dice-based worker placement game. 15 times during the game, players roll a number of 6-sided dice - at least 3, but possibly more. Players then use these dice either individually to claim spaces on the board, which grant you various resources, which you use to build buildings, which grant you both victory points and special abilities.
Like Stone Age, this is a well regarded European-style worker placement game that attempts to integrate dice, and like Stone Age, it fell just a little flat for me. There are several mechanisms in the game that are designed to help the players in last place catch up, which in theory should help to balance out bad rolls, but the way it is implemented, it was fairly easy to game the system, so despite being decidedly in front for most of the game (thanks to basically out-rolling my opponents), I managed to claim an extra die for being "last" on 2 out of the 5 turns of the game. Somehow the game felt both too luck dependent and too deterministic.
Also, I won the first game I played in a landslide (admittedly against another first time player and a player who hadn't played in over a year), and that rarely endears me to a game. I'd like to try it again, maybe with better players so I can get that lovely curbstomped feeling, but for now I am lukewarm.
Just as we were finishing Kingsburg, a couple more folks finally showed up, while Kent and James had to leave. At first, the newcomers (Eliot and Tim) and I were going to play a 3-player game of Caylus, but just as we were getting ready to start, a few more folks came in (whose names I'm ashamed to admit I forgot, lets call them Terrence and Philip), so we decided to instead play a 5 player game of Race for the Galaxy.
It goes without saying at this point that we played with the Gathering Storm and Gathering Storm expansions, so after the near-comical amount of shuffling that this game with both expansions entails, we got started.
I didn't record the scores, but I remember that in the first game, Eliot scored 35, I scored 34, and Tim scored 33. The flappy-headed Canadians (not really Canadians) brought up the rear. I won game 2 in a walk with 50 points, which kind of surprised me because I really felt like I had a hard time getting going. Mostly I just got lucky enough to draw a perfect 6-point development that was immediately worth 10 points for me, and also allowed me to rattle off a couple of 8-point, 4-card consume actions.
Now, a game that I've played 116 times I don't mind winning.
After finishing Race for the Galaxy, Eliot and Tim peeled off to play an extremely quick 2-player game of Caylus, while ur-Phillip and faux-Terrance's friend Celine Dion returned from her haircut to join us for a game of Brass. I taught them how to play, and only managed to boneheadedly leave out a couple of rules. With a game whose strategies are so opaque, it is extremely difficult for new players to compete with someone who has a few games under their belt (and has read a few strategy articles), so unsurprisingly I won by 30 points or so, but I was impressed at how much better all three of them played in the second half of the game.
They expressed interest in maybe getting people together for some big heavy games (Diplomacy, Twilight Imperium), so I texted one of them my email address, but no word yet.
Which is probably what I get for forgetting their names and using them as fodder for an extended South Park: The Movie joke.
Kingsburg
They had already pulled out Kent's copy of Kingsburg, which was a game I'd been wanting to try for a while, so I was more than happy to join in.
Kingburg is a dice-based worker placement game. 15 times during the game, players roll a number of 6-sided dice - at least 3, but possibly more. Players then use these dice either individually to claim spaces on the board, which grant you various resources, which you use to build buildings, which grant you both victory points and special abilities.
Like Stone Age, this is a well regarded European-style worker placement game that attempts to integrate dice, and like Stone Age, it fell just a little flat for me. There are several mechanisms in the game that are designed to help the players in last place catch up, which in theory should help to balance out bad rolls, but the way it is implemented, it was fairly easy to game the system, so despite being decidedly in front for most of the game (thanks to basically out-rolling my opponents), I managed to claim an extra die for being "last" on 2 out of the 5 turns of the game. Somehow the game felt both too luck dependent and too deterministic.
Also, I won the first game I played in a landslide (admittedly against another first time player and a player who hadn't played in over a year), and that rarely endears me to a game. I'd like to try it again, maybe with better players so I can get that lovely curbstomped feeling, but for now I am lukewarm.
Race for the Galaxy
It goes without saying at this point that we played with the Gathering Storm and Gathering Storm expansions, so after the near-comical amount of shuffling that this game with both expansions entails, we got started.
I didn't record the scores, but I remember that in the first game, Eliot scored 35, I scored 34, and Tim scored 33. The flappy-headed Canadians (not really Canadians) brought up the rear. I won game 2 in a walk with 50 points, which kind of surprised me because I really felt like I had a hard time getting going. Mostly I just got lucky enough to draw a perfect 6-point development that was immediately worth 10 points for me, and also allowed me to rattle off a couple of 8-point, 4-card consume actions.
Now, a game that I've played 116 times I don't mind winning.
Brass
They expressed interest in maybe getting people together for some big heavy games (Diplomacy, Twilight Imperium), so I texted one of them my email address, but no word yet.
Which is probably what I get for forgetting their names and using them as fodder for an extended South Park: The Movie joke.
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