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.

3/14 - FITS and Expansion with Hilary

Hilary was quite taken with FITS when we played it with our friends Alana and Thorsten. Poking around on Board Game Geek, I noticed there were several print-n-play expansions available, one official one, and a handful of others designed by Ted Alspach. We printed out the official one and gave Tetris: The Board Game another go.

The new boards were quite hard. I think we may have ended up with fewer points after the 8th round than we had after the 4th. Hard isn't bad though. Really looking forward to trying some of Alspach expansions too - they look like they branch out in some interesting directions.

3/13 - Playbysitting at Alana and Thorsten's

Our good friends and gaming buddies Alana and Thorsten recently had a baby boy (CJ). As per usual with first time parents they are being run ragged, so Hilary and Alana made a date to go to a local spa for a massage and hot tub soak while Thorsten and I watched the baby and played some games, and then we all played a bit once Hilary and Alana returned.

Battle Line

I brought a few 2-player games to try out with Thorsten. The first one I pulled out was the Reiner Knizia classic (well, as classic as a game under 15 years old can be) Battle Line.

In Battle Line players are forming 3-card poker-type hands one card at a time in 9 different spots on the titular line of battle. There are 6 colors and 10 ranks in each color, and players try to put together the best hand (where Straight flush > 3-of-a-kind > Flush > Straight > High card) in each "battle" first player to win 5 total or any 3 in a row wins the game.

Astute readers may have noticed that the connection to "battling" in this game is as tenuous as the connection between Uwe Bol and quality cinema, but it makes for some decent card art (on some very high quality, nigh-waterproof cards - thanks GMT!), and gives the whole "win 3 in a row" thing a reason to exist.

This game (and the next) were new to Thorsten, and played in a somewhat distracted manner as we took turns holding and distracting the baby, and a couple breaks to try to put him down for a nap and to start his training regimen for Olympics 2024 (assuming they make "full-contact-almost-being-able-to-roll-over a sport).

Tigris and Euphrates

Alana and Thorsten actually got me Tigris and Euphrates a couple years ago for my birthday. I've only played it a handful of times as Hilary isn't a big fan, and it was towards the beginning of my "buy-everything-now-now-now!" phase, so it could get lost in the shuffle. It does play equally well with 2 as with 3 or 4 in my opinion, so I brought it along to see if we could get a game in.

When it looked like CJ might nap for a while (spoiler alert: nope), I set the game up and started teaching. Once CJ informed us of his other plans, we decided to try it anyway. Tigris and Euphrates is another Reiner Knizia game, considered by many to be his best, in which players each play the heads of a different people in an extremely abstracted representation of the dawn of agricultural civilization in the fertile crescent lo those many years ago.

Each player has 4 leaders - religious (red), agricultural (blue), political (black), and mercantile (green). Over the course of the game, players use these leaders and associated tiles to score points in these 4 colors. At the end of the game, each player's score is equal to whatever color they scored the least in, so players must endeavor to score points as evenly as possible.

I made a huge error as the game seemed to be getting towards its end that almost cost me the game - by making the wrong choice in which battle to pursue first when 2 kingdoms collided, I ceded a huge chunk of territory to Thorsten. However, I managed to recover by using my disaster tiles (which allow a player to destroy a tile and leave a permanent 'dead zone') to stave off the end of the game long enough to recover and I squeeked out a 17-14 victory.

FITS

FITS is another game by, you guessed it, Reiner Knizia. This one was designed just a couple years ago and really needs no better description than "Tetris: The Board Game". It really is about that simple. The only real differences are the variety of pieces, the fact that you can't slide a piece sideways to get it below something already played, and the fact that there is no time pressure other than people coughing pointedly if you are taking too damned long.

The game plays in 4 scoring rounds with slightly different objectives. In the first round you are just trying to get your pieces meshed together as efficiently as possible, a la tetris, but in future rounds, you use a scoreboard under your pieces that give you bonus points or extra penalties for leaving specific spaces open. We ripped off three games of this in short order before calling it a night.

Game 1: Thorsten 15, Hilary 8, Chris 3
Game 2: Chris 30, Hilary 28, Alana 22, Thorsten 13 (though he only played 2 out of 4 rounds)
Game 3: Thorsten 28, Alana 28, Chris 21, Hilary 21