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.

12/7 - A few games with Trevor and Eric

Trevor had surgery on his ankle to try to stop his hip from hurting. Next week he'll be getting a haircut because he is hungry. In the meantime, Eric and I came over to keep him company and play some games with him in his convalescence.

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Hey! That's My Fish!

Trevor 51, Chris 48
While the title may suggest a light-hearted luckfest, Hey! That's My Fish! is in fact a combinatorial (that's fancy gamer talk for a game with no luck and no hidden information) in disguise. The board is set up randomly and players take turns moving their penguin pieces around the board and claiming fish tiles. Like Shear Panic, the theme and pieces are so cute that many players who might balk at such a dry game will dive right in.

Hive

Chris def. Trevor
Another combinatorial with a theme to make it more palatable, Hive isn't so much cute as creepy.

Pandemic

Chris (Researcher), Eric (Dispatcher), and Trevor (Medic) win on normal difficulty
What happens when GUI designers tackle board game design. Incredibly clean looking game, to the point of sterility for some, but I think it is quite cool. Most cooperative games have started adding some kind of traitor element, but Pandemic is unapologetically an exercise in group-think.

Zendo

Trevor defeats Chris (Master: Eric)
Basically a completely open ended version of Mastermind, Zendo has one player arrange some colored pyramids in a configuration that abides by a rule that he has chosen, and then the other players submit arrangements to him and he tells them whether they fit his rule or not. It is played with the candy-colored translucent pyramids produced by Looney Labs for the Icehouse series of games, but there is really no reason that one couldn't play it with 5 paper-clips, 5 mismatched shoes, and a Wankel Rotary Engine.

12/5 - Can't Stop and Hive

Can't Stop

Won't somebody please help us stop? We Can't Stop! Seriously, I'm trapped in the internet. OK, actually, this was our last game of this for a while, but we've already gotten more than 50 cents of gameplay I'd say.

Hive

This evening, we went and visited my mom. I brought along Hive, a recent acquisition courtesy of the Black Diamond Games auction. My mom has a huge bee fetish - well, enthusiasm at any rate: she was a second grade teacher and teaching kids about bees was one of her favorite parts of the year. No surprise then that she really liked the theme of this game. She has asked me about "the bee game" a number of times since, but it's been hard to find time to play with her juggling 4 grandbabies and chasing/following my dad all around the globe in her retirement.

November 15th: Quirkle and Hive

Hilary and I tried out a couple of the games I picked up at the Black Diamond Games ding and dent sale tonight.

Quirkle

First game we tried out was Quirkle. First impression is that it is a really nice looking and feeling game, with big chunky wooden pieces. The gameplay is rather like Scrabble with colors and shapes. Each row must be composed of a single color or shape (but no exact duplicates), and you can score bonus points by adding tiles that fit into multiple rows at once or by completing a row of 6 of one color or shape (there are 6 colors and 6 shapes, 3 tiles of each).

What I really like about the game is that it is incredibly easy to teach and learn. Anyone familiar with Scrabble can pick it up in about 2 minutes (if not it might take them as many as 3). What I'm not sure about is if there is any real depth here. While in Scrabble you are rewarded for being able to rearrange letters in your mind, most of the possibilities on a given turn of Quirkle will be obvious fairly immediately. There may be some further level of strategy (being able to set up plays for yourself or block your opponents), but it was not obvious to me on my first play.

And I'm not just bitter because Hilary beat me 230 to 200.