Category: Snippets

This week, we were back down to five players and so I thought it was time to try out Cuba, the new game by Michael Rienick and Stefan Stadler that is published by Rio Grande.

The game is about developing your plantation estate to score the most VPs over six rounds. Players earn victory points by shipping merchandise from the harbour, by erecting and using buildings, and by abiding by the law. Each round, parliament declares four bills that can be voted into law during the round. Players then take turns carrying out actions allowed by their five character cards. Only four of these actions are carried out with the final character being used for the voting. Actions range from extracting resources and products from your plantation, spending resources to erect buildings, trading in the marketplace, using the special functions of your buildings and shipping products and goods off the island. When the vote comes around, players can use pesos to buy extra votes and then whoever has the most votes chooses two of the bills to pass into law. Each of the laws is then checked to see if players can abide by it and, if they can, they are rewarded with VPs. The round ends with some tidying up where players lose any products that they haven’t been able to store and the ships in harbour are rearranged. After six rounds, 2 VPs are awarded for each building a player has built and whoever has the most VPs wins.

This was a great game with loads to think about and various strategies to pursue. As is usual with our first playing, this meant that the game took longer to complete than it should. One culprit who had a vested interest in restricting the number of games we manage to get in before the end of the year (due to the hall of fame standings) should have been locked up and the key thrown away for his delaying tactics. One turn, he spent several minutes deliberating before deciding merely to use the tradeswoman to take a single resource. The long term strategic importance of this play failed to register with Mark K and me, particularly as the guilty party was so far behind in VPs he wasn’t likely to win. Mark K played a good game, generating plenty of income to help his plans. Like me, he was able to get some cheap products at the market (which was not used too regularly in this playing). This stockpile and some cigar boxes allowed him on one shipping action to completely fill the most lucrative ship for 15 VPs and he never looked back, although Steve did his best to keep up by using the law that gave VPs for votes cast in parliament. However, Mark K still won to the relief of Nige.

Trying to find the reason for buying a second warehouse on BGG afterwards, I discovered we did play a significant rule wrongly. We played that the foreman activated all buildings whereas the rules say you chose between using only those orthoganally in line with the worker or a single building. This would give yet further things to think about and warehousing would not be the automatic benefit that we picked. I don’t think the way we played harmed the game but I’m interested in how much it tightens things up.

Cuba was very enjoyable and had lots of mechanisms that we thought clever. We particularly liked the way the statutes impacted play, the way the buildings lessened the opportunity to get resources or products, and the shipping process. Getting combinations of buildings that worked together was important and this is a game I can see not becoming stale due to the variety of approaches you can take to generate your VPs. Next time, however, we need to play a bit quicker.

Agricola seems to be one of, if not the biggest, hits of the Essen show. I didn’t pick it up due to the text-heavy German cards but Z-man Games has now come to the rescue. They set up a preorder programme with the promise that they would publish an English version when they got 750 preorders. I signed up pretty much straight away but they have now confirmed that they have already exceeded 850 preorders so the game is set to be produced (hopefully) by April.

The preorder remains open until the end of the year and, for those signing up, Z-man have said that there will be a bonus deck of cards and possibly animeeples rather than plain cubes. Those interested should look at the info on BGG and this thread about the preorder process.

The latest issue of Counter is now out. As usual, the post-Essen issue is filled with views on the latest releases from the greatest game show in the world. With detailed reviews of 1960: the Making of the President, Agricola, Cuba, Galaxy Trucker, Hamburgum and Key Harvest among others, it is an interesting read as always. Alan How also reviews Kingsburg, a game I passed on due to it being sold at 50 euros for the English version (rather than 40 euros for the German) but it looks like the game I most regret leaving behind.

Well, with last week’s scheduled session being cancelled due to lack of committed players and me having won the real life ‘Dancing Dice’ competition at our office 70’s Christmas party (edited highlights will be on Youtube soon – next century, perhaps), I’m feeling refreshed for our next session on Friday 7th December at my house.

Following coljenn’s deportation to some godforsaken corner of Austria, Garry Clarke has taken up the mantle of reporting on the gaming exploits of their local game group and has set up a blog called ….. bet you can’t guess?

Yes, well I know the clue was in the title but, all the same, it’s good that we’ll continue to see how their gaming compares to what we get up to. Link here.

This week’s session of the Shrewsbury Boardgames Club on 30th November will be held at Nige’s house. I can’t attend due to our work Christmas do being that night.

I was amazed to find a copy of Perikles today in the local TK:Maxx. Only £9.99 so couldn’t resist. This is the only Warfrog game I’ve not bought at Essen in years (and that was only because I forgot to go back at the end of my second day to collect it).

There was also a copy of Reiner’s Beowulf (not the Movie version) and Mensa Connections but I already have both of those.

If you’re interested in any of these games, it may be worth a visit.

After missing last week’s session as I was in London, the next session on Friday 23rd November is back at Garry’s house.

This week, there were four of us so I decided to try out Richard Breese’s latest game, Key Harvest. I was looking forward to this as the ‘Key’ series of games has been filled with very good game ideas.

The idea behind the game is to score points by developing plots of land through planting and harvesting fields of particular crops and employing workers to help farm the land. A player’s turn involves taking two out of four possible actions: Firstly, you can initiate the sale of a plot of land, placing it in your store and setting a price in crops (we’re a bartering economy here) for that plot; you can buy a plot of land that has been offered for sale by you or another player, by paying the required combination of crops, and then immediately cultivate it; thirdly, you can employ a worker in your fields and he will give you an immediate benefit (such as awarding you a free harvest or recultivating an already harvested field); and finally you can harvest a group of fields to obtain the crops sown. Whenever plots of land are put up for sale, the market either brings a new plot onto the market or an event occurs. The events interrupt play and give players additional opportunities for developing their position. Once ten events have been drawn, the game ends and scoring takes place with points awarded for each worker employed, each player’s largest and second largest groups of fields and having the greatest stock of each type of crop.

There are some very good ideas in the game and there is a lot of angst in deciding which actions to take – you always want to do more than is available to you. However, our game suffered from the non-appearance of events: we went through six events pretty quickly and then they just dried up – I think the next event turned up over an hour later and, by that time, we were all pretty sure I had the game sewn up that we decided to call time a short while after. We all noted that it was pretty difficult to get the townsfolk into play and I was the only one whose field network really helped bring them into play: I managed to get one of the level 5 and two of the level four guys working for me, whereas only Mark G managed to get a level four worker into play.

I think the others were a bit disappointed – the first half of the game played really well but the tile draw meant that things stagnated badly. I’m not sure it was helped by the way we played as everyone was discouraged from putting things up for sale because, whatever the price set by the person initiating it, the other players were doing their utmost to stop that player from getting it. A bit of negative group-think. However, I would hope that with a better distribution of events and more competition for the townsfolk, another playing should restore my faith in the game – certainly other reports have been pretty positive.

This week’s session on Friday 16th November will be at John’s house, as I am taking Jan down to London to see The Sound of Music.