5.10.10-5.16.10: In with the old, in with the new

Games Played this Week: 8
Dominion x2
Shadow Hunters x2
At the Gates of Loyang x1
Puerto Rico x1
FITS x1
Hive x1

New Games Played this Week: 1
Shadow Hunters

Played some new favorites, some old favorites, and a intriguing newcomer this week.

Dominion

Got in a couple plays of Dominion with the new Alchemy expansion at both ends of the number-of-players spectrum, once at Muddy's with 6 players, and once with just Hilary and myself. While Dominion may not be at it's best with 2, introducing this expansion in a 6-player game was not the best of ideas. 6-player Dominion is a drawn out affair in the best of circumstances, and introducing a bunch of new players to an expansion that puts emphasis on long turns with lots of actions exacerbated that tendency considerably. Next time I'll definitely propose breaking into 2 3-player games instead (which would be quite easy to do with all the expansions). Unsurprisingly Dominion-savant Eliot, now with a couple games of experience under his belt, lapped the field.

Puerto Rico

It was good to get back to Muddy's (for the SF Games meetup - every Friday night at 7:00 PM, Muddy's Cafe, 24th and Valencia, SF) because I got to play some games and see some people that I hadn't seen in some time. If a game that came out in 1997 can qualify as a "classic", then Puerto Rico is that game. Not only was it one of the first games in my collection, it is one of the first deeper Eurogames to really connect in the states. This was one of the few times I had played Puerto Rico where all of the players were fairly experienced, and as the least experienced of the bunch, I got my head handed to me pretty decisively. In the excitement of trying new things, it is easy to forget (and nice to remember) that many of these game designs offer more opportunity for strategy and exploration than I will ever truly be able to explore.

Hive

In some respects, Hive is Chess in reverse. In Chess, you start with a full board of pieces with somewhat constrained options due to the initial setup, you progress into an extremely dynamic and open-ended midgame with literally frillions of options, only to have those options condense into a handful of endgame possibilities with just a few pieces whose results are a foregone conclusion when experienced players are involved. In Hive, you start with an empty board with only a few options, progress through a similarly open-ended midgame to an endgame where the board is full of pieces but the options condense as the board clogs up.

I taught this game to my mom way back in November, but we had not gotten any chance to play it since usually when we saw each other the social dynamic was dominated by the under-5 set. We finally got a chance to sit down for a game this weekend, and we left with my mom vowing that she was going to beat me at this sometime (I'm 3-0 now). Given my predilection for making extremely boneheaded plays at times in these sorts of combinatorial games, I'm sure my uppance will come, sooner rather than later if we get a few more chances to play.

FITS

After Hive, Hilary, my mom and I pulled out FITS (Tetris: the board game). This was a game that I was sure would be a big hit with my mom and I was not wrong. She has always had an attraction to spacial puzzles in all dimensions, and FITS fits that description to a 't'. As sometimes happens when playing with a Stanford psych major/elementary school teacher, the conversation turned to which of my myriad nieces and nephews might be able to handle this game. The box lists the starting age at 8, and while I think an 8-year-old might be able to handle the game mentally, I'm less certain they could be convinced to care about pushing blocks around to leave spaces open or closed. Guess I'll find out in 4 years or so...

Shadow Hunters

The only new game I played this week, this hidden-role, almost-party game (or perhaps a party game for huge nerds) saw a couple plays at Muddy's. There's a lot of variety here, but so much of what you can do is constrained by die rolls and card draws that I'm not convinced that this game doesn't offer more of the illusion of choice than the real thing. It is natural to compare this to Bang, another hidden-role game with a significant amount of randomness. Shadow Hunters definitely offers a much lower barrier to entry, but I'm not sure that Bang doesn't offer more opportunity to bluff, double-bluff, and psych out in the who-is-who game.