Category: Snippets

The next session of the Shrewsbury Boardgames Club will be on Friday 18th April 2008 at Garry’s house.

This week, we started with Traumfabrik which has not been played at the club for some while. In fact we needed to go and reprint the English rules translation as nobody could remember all the rules. Steve and Guy had not played before.

Nige was first to complete a film,closely followed by Guy and myself in the other two categories. In fact Guy’s film was an impressive 19 pointer which took best film in all three intermediate scorings. I managed to take the worst film award with just four points and managed to complete all the films I was working on. However, with only three mediocre and one diabolical film, it was never going to be enough. Guy seemed to have this wrapped up fairly easily although his margin of victory was even larger than anyone thought.

Traumfabrik remains a top-notch auction game with lots of fun casting well known actors in films they wouldn’t normally be seen dead in. Steve and Guy both rated it highly.

We then had a go at Lascaux by Dominque Ehrhard and Michel Lalet and published by Mayfair Games. The game is loosely based around ancient cave paintings but the theme could really be anything. However, the game play is very good and adds a bluffing element to the bidding mechanism used in Geschenkt (English edition: No Thanks!)

A set of cards gets laid out each round (normally between four and seven). Each card shows one of the cave animal paintings and two colours. Players have a set of 6 tokens, one for each colour, and places one of these face down to indicate the card colours he would like to win. Players then, in turn, have to pay a stone into the pot to stay in the bidding or drop out and take all of the stones in the pot. The others continue until there is one player left in the bidding. That player reveals their token and takes all of the animal cards showing the colour on the token. The last to drop out then reveals their token and takes any cards in that colour if any. This continues until all the cards have been taken or all the tokens revealed. Any remaining cards are left over for the next round. Rounds continue in identical fashion until all the 54 cards in the deck have been taken. Then players add up the number of animals of each of the 6 types that they have collected and the player with the most of a type scores points equal to the number of animals of that type they have. Each set of six bidding stones a player is left with gains another point and most points wins.

This is a very simple game but has some agonising choices to be made. Your choice of colour is partly determined by how far you’re going to bid and partly by second-guessing what others have chosen. Running out of bidding stones is not good as you then have to drop out quickly and it may take a while to recoup enough stones to compete in later rounds. Coming second is also tough quite often particularly if there is one key colour that the high bidders are bound to be pursuing. Remembering what animals others have collected is advisable but hard when card batches taken may include two or three different types of animal. However, concentrating on one or two types and getting at least five of them is a pretty safe option – although not easy to achieve.

In our game, Mark K got down to just a couple of chips at one stage. He did get some good cards for his expense but I thought that may have caused bigger problems than it actually did. Guy seemed to be the master of second-guessing but really only concentrated on one animal type. That said, he did get eight of them. Steve, Nige and I kept getting the poor end of the cards, spending lots of rounds where one or other or all of us came away with nothing. The final round saw Steve and I going for broke and although I got the cards I wanted, Steve got a bucketful of stones. He ended up with 4 points from stones alone. The final scores were pretty tight but Mark K got the most cards in two animal categories and with just enough stones left for an extra point just outscored Guy and Steve by a single point. We all thought Lascaux was a really good 30 minute end-of-evening game and I’m sure this one will get played quite a bit.

Simon Emmins has just launched a new website that does exactly what the URL suggests it does.

FindYourGameStore is a website dedicated to helping gamers find their games. RPG’s, CCG’s, Board Games, TMG’s, all these pastimes frequently require tracking down the specialist shops that carry them. Though more and more of these lines are appearing on the high street it can sometimes be extremely difficult to find the more focused stores.

FindYourGameStore allows the gamer to track down the closest shop for all their gaming needs. It concentrates on the specialist stockists rather than more mainstream store chains, shops which are sometimes hard to find if you are new to an area.

One of the games I’ve been looking forward to this year is nearly upon us. The Days of Wonder website states that TTR – The Card Game will ship during week commencing 21 April 2008. With a 15 Euro price tag on the DoW website, it will probably retail at £12 – £14.

The info page for the game is here and the rules are here.

The rules look interesting: The game retains the flavour of the boardgame but adds a bit of a memory element and the chance to attack other players’ cards held in their railyard.

 

 

I got a message last night from Richard Denning on preparations for this year’s UK Games Expo. Richard says:

UK Games Expo is now less than 2 months away and plans are well advanced. It is our goal to create a mini Essen type show here in the UK and to encourage British companies to exhibit and also release games at it and eventually to attract over seas companies along. We also aim to attract RPG companies, minaitures and other exhibitors and make the whole event fun, attractive to gamers as well as the public and hopefully something folk look ahead to.

At Expo this year we host a Grand Board Game Tournament including rounds of Imperial, Powergrid, Phoenicia, St Petersburg, Container, Acquire, On the Under ground, Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne. This last one is a UK Championship with the winner going onto Essen to play in the world championship ane Expo will pay for their flight. the overall Grand boardgame tournament winner can win £100 to spend on the JKLM stand. Games Signed by Reiner Knizia are also prizes.
 
New Games this year include:
 
Monastery from Ragnar Brothers.
Athene from JKLM
Huang Di from JKLM
Confucius from Surprised Stare
Ice Flow from Ludorum
and a new game from Warfrog.
 
Hot news is that US Board Game company Wattsalpoag are attending and exhibiting games.
 
Friday and Saturday Nights there is free gaming rooms in the Strathallan – this year we have taken their big room which had a wedding in last year so I hope lots of gamers want to come over and play the new games. If you are looking to stay the night I am advised that the hotel has only a few rooms left. However nearby hotels have rooms still. See our page on hotels:
http://www.ukgamesexpo.co.uk/accommodation.php
 
Hope this is of interest.
 
Richard

Thomas Arnold has produced a fantastic java version of Kingsburg. I tried out a three player game tonight and it worked extremely well. You can download a copy here.

This week’s session of the Shrewsbury Boardgames Club will be on Friday 4th April 2008 and will be at Garry’s house, where we will be battling against the kids who are having a movie night at the same time.

This week we travelled to Utopia to help the Utopian king develop its four islands by inviting princes from the five great civilizations to visit and build monuments and wonders around the many districts of the kingdom. The game was designed by Ludovic Vialla and Arnaud Urbon and published by Matagot / Rio Grande.

Utopia is played in rounds until one player has accumulated at least 50 prestige points to trigger the endgame.  Each round proceeds the same way.  First, Guest tokens are drawn randomly until you have 3 times the number of players.  Each Guest token has a picture of a citizen of one of the 5 civilizations as well as a symbol corresponding to one of the 4 islands on the board.  In the first phase of a round, the arrival of the Princes, the players will, one at a time, remove one of the Guest tokens from the board and place one of their matching Prince tokens on any of the districts of the appropriate island.  If a player is able to group 3 of their prince tokens of the same civilization together in the same district, the tokens may be removed from the board and replaced with a monument of the appropriate kind. Also on their turn, if a player has a Prince from each of 5 civilizations on the same island, one of the 4 wonders can be built on the island.  The builder of the wonder immediately receives 6 prestige points and, whenever any other player builds a monument on that island, he receives between 1 and 4 additional prestige points.

In the second phase of a round, development of the city, all players are randomly dealt 5 Action Cards, which are simply cards depicting each of the 5 different civilizations.  Then in turn order, the players carry out as many actions using their Action Cards as they so choose.  A player may refrain from using all their cards, but may only carry over a maxium of 5 cards.  The actions involve adding, removing or moving princes, or altering the popularity of a civilization. The last of these can be important because after all players have taken their turns playing action cards, calculation of prestige occurs.  In scoring, the players receive prestige points for each monument they possess based on the civilization’s popularity so each monument can be worth between 1 and 5 points. If a player reaches 50 or more points in this phase, the game ends at the end of the round and the player with the most points wins.

In our game, Steve started off trying to control the Island of Water and for the most part succeeded in persuading others to concentrate elsewhere, at least for a while. Most people tried to establish one or two quick monuments, although the early builders, Mark K and I, found that the monuments of these civilizations magically weren’t terribly popular. Guy was the first to build a wonder and did so on an island where lots of monuments had still to be built. However, he was also able to build some monuments soon after and his position looked very strong. Mark G soon managed to get 1 monument in each of the five civilizations so then was guaranteed to rake in 15 points per round. My challenge faded when I misread one of the monuments on Steve’s Island of Water and so the wonder I was seeking to build there ended up a man short and Steve built the wonder ahead of me on the next turn. It did mean I was able to build a couple more monuments in the final round and scored a massive 24 points in that scoring but I still came up short with Guy maintaining a fairly comfortable lead.

Utopia seemed to be nearly a very good game. It took longer to play than we had expected and it was a bit dry and brain burning. However, it played solidly and the production is top-notch, although distinguishing between different monuments and civilizations should have been made easier.. All of us thought it was a borderline 6/7 but most of us came down on the 6 side. I wonder how playing with fewer players might alter things.

Having missed out on Friday’s regular session, Chris and I sat down on Sunday afternoon to play Race for the Galaxy. The game takes a bit of explaining but Chris picked up the basic strategies pretty well. However, with this being his first try at the game, he was further down the learning curve as far as determining how the card combinations work well together. We played the advanced two player version with each player picking two actions per turn, as I thought this would get the game moving a lot quicker.

Chris went down the military route and built up his military capability reasonably quickly but he did not have any cards with consume powers which definitely hurt him. This was especially true as I was drawing cards that helped with the consume / produce route of play. Chris built the Alien Tech Institute and with an alien production world and two windfall worlds got a nice 9 point bonus at the end of the game. I had the Mining League and had managed to draw and build both Mining Robots and Mining Conglomerate so also got an endgame 9 point bonus. However, I had managed to Consume x2VP twice for 10 VPs each time, which made all the difference and I ran out a comfortable winner 45 – 28.

Even though he was finding his feet, Chris did enjoy it and I’m sure we’ll be playing again. I’m just now starting to see some of the real strategy options from certain card combinations and this is raising my opinion of the game as the big variety of cards means there are lots of variables to explore each time you play. In a month where the new games played have not quite hit the mark for me, Race for the Galaxy looks like being my Game of the Month for March.

This week, we had another go at Kingsburg – our January game of the month. Guy had not played before but, as it is a dice game, we explained that Mark G was hot favourite.

Well, the first turn sort of went to form as Mark G rolled an 18!!! However, Guy and I covered both the 6 and 12 and Mark K, who had himself rolled a 16, used one of his +2 tokens to cover the 18, meaning Mark G had no space on which to place. We all said that this was a very harsh course of action for Kennett to take – very funny but harsh.

After the experience of our first game, most of us concentrated on the Inn/Market/Farms building row to gain the extra white die. Mark K achieved that first but I managed it a season later, from which point on, I suffered several turns of rolling less than 10 on four dice.

Unlike the last game, we did encounter some of the nastier monsters but Mark G was always a match for them having built up his protective buildings. Nige seemed to keep lacking the resources he really wanted to build with and this hampered his progress a bit, while Guy seemed to be happy experimenting with the less popular building rows. The last winter was pretty devastating with everyone other than Mark G losing a building and a couple of VPs but he wasn’t quite able to peg back Mark K who always seemed to be comfortably a step or two ahead of the rest of us.

Again an extremely fun game, with Guy also rating it highly even though he ended up quite a way behind the rest of us points-wise.