Spiel: Boardgaming in the UK

This week, with six of us, we decided to have another play of Antike, a game that we all seem to like. Going into the game, there was one thing of which we were all certain: Mark G would be concentrating on constructing massive armies and stomping on his neighbours. Unfortunately for Mark K, this meant him and pretty much drove him down a defensive strategy.

Steve and Guy started off by pursuing temples, whereas Nige and I sent our armies into new territories to settle new cities. I also started to develop my fleet as no-one else seemed interested and quickly took a point from being in seven sea territories. I also nabbed the sailing ability, while others concentrated on some of the other technologies. At the end it looked close between Steve, Nige and myself and I thought I had just enough points to sack two of Nige’s temples. However, I was just 1 point short and so needed to wait one more turn, which never came. We played using the second edition rules, which gives a VP to players who finish all eight advancements and this was all Steve needed to squeak the win. Well played, although I think he, Guy and I all benefitted from having edge starting positions well away from Mark G!

Antike remains a very good game and one which we all enjoy. You never know, one day we may see Mark G try to win without using his stomping strategy.

Glory to Rome, designed by Carl Chudyk and published by Cambridge Games Factory, is a card game about the rebuilding of Rome after Nero burns it down, as players seek to be the ones who earn the most fame during the rebuilding. Like San Juan, each card has multiple functions: It can be a “Role” (Labourer, Craftsman, Legionary, Architect, Merchant, or Patron), a Material (that matches one of the six sites: Marble, Stone, Wood, Rubble, Brick, and Concrete), or one of forty different buildings.

On a player’s turn, they may either play one of their cards in front of them as one of the roles, or “think”. Each other player, in order, may either play the same card and take the same action, or “think”. Thinking allows a player to either take a Jack (wild card) into their hand, restock their hand up to five cards, or draw one card (if they already have at least five cards). The roles allow players to take different actions:
– The Patron allows a player to add a card to their Clientele, which adds to the number of actions a role card can take.
– The Laborer allows a player to add cards to their Stockpile as a material.
– The Merchant allows a player to take a card from their Stockpile and store it face down in their vault for VPs at the end of the game.
– The Legionary allows a player to steal cards from neighbouring players and stick them in their Stockpile.
– The Craftsman and Architect cards allow the player to start work on or add materials to a building, the former role using cards from hand and the latter cards from the stockpile.

Play continues until either the draw deck runs out, all the Building Site cards have been used, one player builds the Catacomb building, or a player has won by building the Forum (alternate victory conditions). Unless the Forum’s victory conditions have been met, all players total their victory points from buildings, the vault and bonuses from having the most cards of each type in the vault. The player with the most victory points is the winner!

In our game, Nige concentrated on building up his clientele initially and then drew the Forum so he was looking to end the game early by building the forum and have clientele of all six types. At times, this looked most likely to be the outcome but Nige seemed to struggle to get the right cards to allow him to finish. I went for building lots of cheap buildings but as a result missed out a couple of times on adding cards to the vault. Mark K did, however, succeed in getting a decent number of vault cards squirreled away – just as well as his stockpile was extensive. Both he and Guy were concentrating on some of the larger more valuable buildings so although they built fewer, they converted to similar VPs. At the end though, Mark K did just enough from vault points and bonuses to take the win.

Glory To Rome is another nice addition to the San Juan / Race for the Galaxy family of card games and looks to have quite a bit of replay value. Like RftG, it takes a while to work out what you are doing and which card combinations work well together. This is one to try again soon.

Jackson Pope has just published news on BGG about what he is currently up to at Reiver Games. Reiver Games have published two games so far (Border Reivers and the fun bodyparts game, It’s Alive) and more is on the way in 2008. Here is what Jack has to say:

“It’s an exciting time for Reiver Games, I’ve quit my day job to concentrate on Reiver Games. Our third game, Carpe Astra should be available in July and I’ve received loads of submissions in response to a request for designs.

Conventions
This year we’re hoping to attend Beer & Pretzels in Burton-on-Trent in May, the UK Games Expo in Birmingham in June – where I’ll be a judge for Game of the Year, and Spieltage in Essen, Germany in October. In addition, we’re hoping to get along to a number of smaller UK cons, more details when I have them.

Carpe Astra – Seize the Stars
Reiver Games are proud to annouce their third game: Carpe Astra by Ted Cheatham (Silk Road) and Jackson Pope (Border Reivers 🙂 ). It’s a medium weight game for 2-4 players, and lasts 20-60 minutes. It will feature artwork by R H Aidley again (he did the artwork for It’s Alive!), and will be professionally manufactured, meaning I can sell it through shops and distributors. I’m offering a 30% discount to customers who pre-order a copy. Pre-orders will be shipped before I send out copies to distributors and shops. If you’d rather buy from a shop, please contact you local game shop or favourite online store and ask them to stock it.

Here’s some blurb about the game:
10,000 years in the future, humanity has claimed the stars. But all is not well. The Emperor is weak, and without strong guidance the Empire is crumbling. Powerful guilds within the empire are squabbling, positioning themselves for their own gain. If the Empire is to survive, it needs a strong leader – that means you! You must build a powerbase throughout the Empire by connecting with important guilds: the military, traders, priests, engineers, expansionists and politicians and then claim the throne. Time is running out though, others also struggle for the throne. You must form a network of support with powerful guilds and slandering your opponents. Each connection gains the support of some guilds, at the end of the game the player with the most support grasps the Galactic Throne. Take advantage of events that occur for further gain. Be careful though, as each slander you receive reduces your support.

It’s Alive!
It’s Alive! is nearly a year old, and it’s still proving very popular with an average rating of 7.0 and ranking in the top 1,000 of the 35,000 games on BoardGameGeek. I still have some copies left, so if you’re still after one order now before they are all gone. I estimate there is between three and six weeks stock remaining.

What’s Next?
I’m hoping to get three games published in the next twelve months. I’ve received in excess of fifty submissions from designers, some of those will be coming out over the next few months – watch this space!

Cheers,

Jack”

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.