04/04 - At Zephyr Cafe

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.

Kingsburg

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.

Race for the Galaxy

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.

Brass

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.

12/19 - D&D FAIL

Went over to John's on the 19th to play in the D&D game he runs. Unfortunately, Ian ending up having to work due to a work crisis, we didn't have enough to play, so we hauled out a few games to play instead.

Monsters Menace America

Jake is not generally a board game fan, find them a bit dry, so we wanted to find something with an interesting theme. Monsters Menace America, in which players take control of a sci-fi movie style monster and basically try to destroy as much stuff as they can. Each player also takes control of a branch of the military to try to put up some resistance against the other player's monsters (they are roughly as effective as the military is in most monster movies).

The game is not without its problems - the entire "run around the board smashing stuff" part of the game is rendered somewhat moot by the "battle royale" at the end of the game where the monsters duke it out for supremacy, but it is reasonably light on rules, not too long, and it looks fantastic. We played two games, of which I won the first and Grey the second.

Race for the Galaxy

After the second game of Monsters Menace America, Grey and Jake went home, but John and I played a few more games. We started with Race for the Galaxy, which I brought over. One problem with having played this game 100+ time is that the games tend to run together, so I don't know what happened in this game, but John won 37-34.

Attika

Not a prison-riot simulation, but a game where players are building Greek city-states by gathering resources and placing tiles. With more players Attika suffers from a bit of kingmaking - often one player will be in a position where they are forced to stop another player from winning, but in so doing they slow themselves down enough that they take themselves out of the game as well. No such problem with 2 though, where the game is probably best. I edged John out in this one.

Elfenland

Older Speil des Jahres winners are sometimes a mixed bag as they tended to be directed even more so than now towards "games that a German family might want to play with their kids" rather than "gamers" per se. That shows up in the art for Elfenland, which is not quite as saccharine as My Little Pony, but it definitely has leanings in that direction.

It was designed by Ticket to Ride designer Alan R. Moon, and like that game it centers around building routes. There's a lot more going on here though than in the simple rummy-mechanic of TTR. However, as a 2-player game it felt a little empty, but John and I both thought that our wives might like it and decided we'd pull it out the next time the 4 of us got together.

12/17 - Race for the Galaxy with Hilary

Chris def Hilary
What a difference a few days makes. Not only did I lose my job, I beat Hilary in Race for the Galaxy! At the time, I probably would have switched those two, but with the benefit of the 2 months of hindsight between playing this game and writing about it, I'm actually pretty content with the way things ended up.

12/14 - Race for the Galaxy with Hilary

Hilary def Chris
After 7 long days of excruciating not gaming, I finally badgered Hilary into a game of Race for the Galaxy and got stomped for my troubles.