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.

5/3 - 5/9: The Arrival of Alchemy

Games Played this Week: 12
Dominion x 6
Thunderstone x 2
The Three Commandments x 1
At The Gates of Loyang x 1
Campaign Manager 2008 x 1
Roll Through the Ages x 1

New Games/Expansions Played this Week: 3
The Three Commandments
At the Gates of Loyang
Dominion: Alchemy

My preorder of Dominion: Alchemy arrived on Friday, and I picked it up from Just Awesome on Saturday morning. Unsurprisingly, this dominated (see what I did there?) my gaming repertoire this week, as I played it 6 times in 2 days. Most of these games came in the every-other-Sunday meetup at Mission Creek Cafe, where Sean, Eliot, Zach, and I played 4 games before finishing off the afternoon with a game of Roll Through The Ages.

Dominion: Alchemy
Alchemy adds another metric to the purchasing algorithm of Dominion. Last week, I wrote about how Thunderstone used two different currencies: money and attack power. In Alchemy, Dominion integrates a similar mechanic, though in a much more limited way. The second currency comes in the form of a new basic treasure type, the Potion. There are certain cards that have a potion as part of the cost. This makes them a bit more difficult to get, so naturally they are significantly more powerful than the other cards.

Designer Donald X. Vaccarino used this opportunity to get in some truly interesting and powerful cards that would have been difficult to justify for any cost in the original set. While there is a fairly heavy focus on cards that grant extra actions, the poster child is definitely Possession, a card that lets the player to your left take an extra turn that you control, and giving you any cards he or she obtained on that turn.

I have to admit that so far I like this expansion much more than I thought I would upon first reading about it. The new cards are far more interesting than I expected, and their focus on granting extra actions really pushes players away from the tried and true "big money" strategy. This can result in some very long turns as players are sometimes able to play double-digit quantities of action cards, but aside from shying away from introducing it to inexperienced players, I don't mind that too much. The one other nominal downside is that if you are going to play with Alchemy, you should really play with 3-5 Alchemy cards (as recommended in the rules). This means that the games with Alchemy are dramatically different than the games without, as opposed to Seaside or Intrigue where 1 or 2 cards from the set could seamlessly blend in.

At the Gates of Loyang
Uwe Rosenberg's new game finally made it's way into a US publishers hands, and I played a game with Erik and Deborah with Just Awesome's demo copy. This game is billed as the third of a trio of Rosenberg games that include Agricola and Le Havre, though the games don't share all that much in common other than length (they all fall in the 2-3 hour range) and goods that multiply (though this is much more central to Loyang and Agricola than Le Havre).

While this was the third game released, it was in fact the first developed, and I can see signs of that as I play it. While none of the games feature much direct interaction, blocking what other players are doing (more making sure you do it before they block you) is of central importance in the other two games, while in Loyang, players are mostly optimizing their own little farming puzzle, occasionally interacting with players, but not in a way that is terribly forseeable or preventable.

The biggest opportunity to affect other players is in the card draft, which I can't decide whether to describe as "quirky" or "arbitrary". Despite being fairly simple, the drafting mechanic is a little confusing to explain to new players, and while I give high marks for trying to do something different, I couldn't help but wonder if a more conventional "take one, pass the others to the left" drafting mechanism wouldn't have been just as good.

Lest I sound like I didn't like it, I hasten to point out that the "little farming puzzle" I refer to above is quite engaging, and the components are both outstanding and adorable. Definitely one I'll be playing again, but after one play it's not on my "I must own this" list.

The Three Commandments
The final new game I played this week was an odd kind-of-party game by Friedemann Friese and the Lamont brothers. I enjoyed it fairly well, but this game is truly schizophrenic about what it is trying to be.

As a party game, it is far too complex for players who are looking for something along the lines of Apples to Apples or Taboo. The host ("high priestess") each round must keep track of whether a player's actions are violating rules that she (sic) has designated as "good karma" or "bad karma" and reward them points accordingly. The actions can either have to do with how the player manipulates the wooden pieces on the board (e.g. "If the player moves a white piece") or with how the player behaves (e.g. "If the player dances/sings/talks to a player outside of the game/touches his or her hair, etc.).

However, while more "serious" gamers might appreciate the Mastermind/Zendo-like logic puzzle of figuring out the rules of the board, they stand a pretty good chance of being annoyed by having to figure out whether they are supposed to dance/sing/stand up/sit down/fight fight fight.

On top of all that, the game is a lot harder if players aren't actually at least passingly familiar with all of the 80-something possible rules, meaning that first time players either need to take the time to skim through them all, or they just need to be almost completely in the dark for their first play.

For all that, I still enjoyed it, but it does seem like the design goes out of its way to alienate as many people who might enjoy it as possible. I could see this becoming a favorite with a very regular group who play it every time they meet, but as a casual party game that people will be up and running with after 2 minutes of rules and 3 minutes of play, its kind of a dud.

4/25 - Daytime Dominion at Just Awesome Games

On Sunday afternoon I headed over to Just Awesome games for their monthly Sunday "Daytime Dominion," played a couple games of Dominion, and got to try out a new shiny.

Dominion

When I got to the store, there were a couple games of Dominion going on, so I jumped in on an Intrigue-only game that Jim, his son Bertrand, and a kid named Taylor (whose dad was in the store but not in this game) were playing.

It started off a little weird as Jim informed me that they "did not allow the big money strategy" because "they didn't know how to beat it." This struck me as a strange way to attack it, but as big money isn't necessarily all that dominant in an environment with all-Intrigue cards, it didn't really bother me. I was able to effectively combo together the Torturer (+3 cards, opponents must discard 2 or take a Curse) and the Shanty Town (+2 Actions, draw 2 cards if you have no more action cards in hand) to run through big piles of my deck, messing up other people's draws and decks in the process. The other players started to catch on, but I managed to just edge out Taylor, 31 to 30, with Bertrand (11) and Jim (8) buying lots of nearly useless coppersmiths to clog up their deck.

Jim and Bertrand left after the first game and Taylor and I joined Troy and Brendan for a game with a random set of cards from the base game plus both expansions. We ended up with the Outpost (take a second turn with just 3 cards) and the Haven (+1 Card/+1 Action, choose a card from your hand to send to the FUTURE...ok to your next turn). I was able to combine these plus some good fortune to win by 10. Taylor once again came in second - pretty good for a ~10 year old.

Fresco

The last couple times I'd been in Just Awesome, I'd seen folks playing Fresco, but I hadn't had the chance to try it myself yet. The store was pretty quiet, so Erik and Shane offered to teach it to me.

In Fresco, players take the role of competing painters who are trying to attain the most prestige for their part in painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Very high minded, and it lets them show nearly naked folks on their board without it seeming prurient.

During the game, players need to decide how early to wake up every turn: wake up early and you get first shot at new paints in the market, but they will be expensive and your apprentices will be ticked off at having to get up so early (really). Wake up later and the paints will be cheaper ("everything must go!"), and if they are sufficiently impressed by the ease of their existence, one of the apprentices will bring along his stoner roomate Zack to help out.

Apprentices can help you go to the market, paint the ceiling, mix paint, paint family portraits to raise money, or take the day off and get hammered go to the theater (for more delicious delicious happiness).

I can't tell if I like this game or not yet. I feel like in a couple more plays either I'll start to see how everything interacts and I'll be able to see what is happening and execute an actual strategy or I'll still have no idea what is going on and the game will just feel like moving things around at random.

The problem is (or at least may be) that so much of what is going on in the game is hidden-but-trackable. You can see what paints players are getting at the market, and what colors they are mixing them into, but since they are keeping all of their paints behind a screen after obtaining them, it's pretty hard, if not nigh impossible, to try to figure out what victory point tiles (which each have a different combination of paint colors) people are going for. You usually can find something to do with your paints even if someone takes "your" tile, so it's possible I'm overselling this problem, but for the first game I really felt buried in my own set of actions. Definitely one I'll try again though.