Category: Snippets

SR: 4th July 2008 – Agricola

Well the long wait was over and tonight we finally managed to play the brand spanking new English edition of Agricola. Designed by Uwe Rosenberg and published by Z-Man Games, Agricola is a development game based around farming where you are trying to build up your farm and family while making sure everyone gets fed. The scoring at the end takes account of so many different areas of play that you can never succeed in every aspect so you need to pick which ones to concentrate on. With so many different cards in the game, it is likely to play differently every time and as it accommodates between 1 and 5 players, it should see a fair amount of play.

Having read on BGG strong recommendations to play the family version on the first attempt, I set things up for this version only to find Nige very determined to go straight into the full game. So the full game we went for and, although it did take quite a bit longer to play, about 3 hours 15 minutes, the addition of the Occupation cards and Minor Improvements didn’t make things that much more complex. My cards did not look terribly good on first examination, especially when compared to a couple of really nice cards played early on by Guy and Nige. I did eventually work my farm round to making good use of my Occupations but it took a while. Guy did lots of ploughing and got a nice crop production going whereas Mark K and I concentrated on grazing although this meant we were eating our livestock on a fairly regular basis. I was the only one to upgrade my buildings to stone (I had a card giving me a discount on renovating and one giving a bonus 2 points for a stone farmhouse), although everyone else but Guy managed to renovate once. Nige ended up with the most family members (5), closely followed by Mark K, whereas both Guy and Mark G stuck with their original two farmers throughout.

None of us was sure who had won due to the complexity of the scoring but, when I had totted everything up, it appeared Nige had triumphed by a single point. I say appeared because it wasn’t until I was clearing the game away that I realised I had short-changed my own total by 2 points, meaning I had pipped Nige by a single point.

We all thought the game was very good although it’s not quite up to the hype it has been getting. The thing it really has going for it though is the replayability. Mark K knocked it down a notch due to the time taken to play but Guy gave it a top mark of 10, as he liked the way you developed in your own way and people couldn’t mess with your plans (other than nabbing the action you wanted before you). I’m looking forward to trying this more and hopefully will get the family to give the introductory version a go.

Sorry Nige!

 

I hate to kick a guy when he’s down (at the bottom of the Hall of Fame), but I added up the scores wrongly for our game of Agricola last night. My score was actually 30 rather than 28 which means I pipped you for the win. This is where I grovel about being so embarrassed about my incompetency but look on the bright side – at least you lost it to me rather than Mark or Guy! Full report to follow. 

SR: 27th June 2008 – Tribune, Mission: Red Planet

We got to play Tribune tonight, designed by Karl Heinz Schmiel and published by Fantasy Flight Games. However, it turned out to be a much shorter experience than we expected.

We opted for the medium length five player game which involved achieving three victory conditions with a compulsory Tribune. On the first turn, my cards pointed me towards the Senator faction but a Vestal Virgin leader on the first regional building looked too tempting so I also set another worker up for a second Vestal V card. Mark G had placed a worker to takeover the V.V. faction so I decided to bide my time for turn 2. Having successfully taken over the Senators, my path was clear and I (over)bid to ensure I got the chariot to protect the Senators and concentrated on the two available V.V. cards that turned up in the second round. This meant that I was able to gain both a Tribune and Favour of the Gods and ended the second turn just 1 ducat short of the 30 needed for my third victory condition. It was, by that stage, obvious that I could easily win on the next turn as nobody else looked to be able to get to three victory conditions so we stopped the game there.

Although I was pleased my plans fell into place so well, we were all disappointed the game was over so quickly and ratings suffered as a result. I think playing without a compulsory tribune would make the game more wide open and, as there are other variants included in the game that don’t require a Tribune, we’ll just have to try one of those next time. That said, I thought the mechanics were really good and I hope we play again soon – maybe with fewer than five players.

We then opted for a game of Mission: Red Planet which all of us other than Guy had played before. That said, we all seemed to have forgotten the rules so it took a while to refresh our memories. The first round saw two of Steve’s guys get lost in space and so he spent most of the rest of the game pointing out how far behind he was, although I’m sure he knew none of us believed him. Guy scored really well in the first two rounds of scoring but then got picked on a bit so faded in the final scoring and had one of his potential bonuses sabotaged by my final turn removing one of his guys from a vital sector of Mars. Nige looked to be finishing strongly by controlling both a ‘2’ and ‘3’ value region and he managed to score both his bonuses as did Mark G. However, Steve was raking in points in lots of regions and critically got the bonus for most ice points, adding 9 to his score and taking the win by 3 points.

M:RP remains a really fun game although it is pretty chaotic – a typical Bruno Faidutti trait. Guy liked it as well although he probably trimmed a point off his rating for having been picked on at the end.

Keltis is the Spiel des Jahres

The winner of this year’s Spiel des Jahres has just been announced. Congratulations to Reiner Knizia for winning this award for the first time. Keltis is published by Kosmos and  is the boardgame multiplayer version of Lost Cities.

Reiner also took the Children’s Game award for Wer War’s published by Ravensburger. There was also a special award for Agricola (Uwe Rosenberg, Lookout Games) as the best Complex Game of the year.

SR: 20 June 2008 – Container

This week, Nige brought along Container, a game he’d just picked up that was designed by Thomas Ewert and Franz-Benno Delonge and published by Valley Games. This is a game that simulates a simple supply and demand system, based around production, warehousing and shipping of some unnamed merchandise.

As we decided not to play with the beginner’s variant, we knew money was going to be very tight and that drawing loans was a bad idea. Nevertheless, all of us were forced to take at least one loan eventually. Initially, I chose to build a second and then third warehouse to try and attract people to more efficient loading of ships. However, the group-think reaction of refusing to use my dock lead me to having a number of turns with little to do due to lack of cash, until I broke down and took a loan – at which stage people decided that was enough screw tightening and the containers started to flow.

Our caution over cash lead to no profit being made on production and warehousing as people refused to pay more than the minimum price for stuff. Mark K tried to use his monopoly on one type of machine to set a medium price but, once things became critical, I broke his monopoly by building the same machine and bringing the price down. So, the only real money to made was in the island bidding. Seeing which shipments players really wanted for themselves was an interesting challenge but I managed to force John and Nige to pay more than they expected to by setting a relatively high bid myself. Eventually, Nige forced the end of the game by exhausting the supply of two container types as he judged he was far enough in the lead. He was just right because my next turn would probably have netted me enough cash from an island shipment to just go past him.

Container was a good game that suffered a little from the profit being made from just one aspect of the production chain. If the same group could be persuaded to take a different collective view, it will be interesting to see how the game plays differently but whether such a change is likely, I don’t know. However, a nice game that I really enjoyed playing.