Now I’m back from holiday, I’m looking forward to the next session of the Shrewsbury Boardgames Club, which will be on Friday 22nd February at Garry’s house.
SR: 1 February 2008 – Hamburgum
This week, five of us tried out Hamburgum, the latest game by Mac Gerdts and published by eggert spiele / Rio Grande. The game uses the now familiar rondel device (Antike / Imperial) for players to select their turn actions but, unlike the previous games, there is no real conflict – rather it is the economic aspects of play that are important.
The game is about the development of the city of Hamburg in the 17th century and centres on the city as a trading centre and the building of its mighty cathedrals. Using the rondel, players choose ontheir turn between several actions: Producing one of the goods for which the area was renowned: sugar, cloth or beer (we are in Germany, after all); building ships which can then be used for selling your goods; trading – either selling goods that you have acquired via your ships (or, for less income, the local market) or buying raw materials (stone or timber or occasionally a church bell); using your raw materials to construct buildings around the city (each of which will convey a benefit either immediately or later in the game); or finally making a donation to the church. Each donation contributes to building one fifth of a cathedral and in return the player receives a token which can be cashed in during the game or at the end for prestige points. Once the six cathedrals have been completed, the game ends and whoever has accumulated the most VPs wins.
In our game, I was the start player so, with a lack of cash, chose to produce a good and ship two to gain the cash to afford 6 materials which, in turn, enabled me to construct three buildings. John followed a similar route but was not as bold in terms of spending his cash. This seemed to set him back a bit. Later in the game, Nige made a big play for ships and, having obtained the 2VP per ship donation tokens started to rake in the points. He made a slight mistake by not cashing all his tokens in when he had all five ships in harbour and missed out slightly when Mark K followed the same route through the dockyard to reduce Nige’s fleet. Mark did build himself for lots of points at the end through lots of donations to the church but he had, in the meantime, fallen a bit too far behind with the in-game point scoring. My good start faltered towards the end and recognising that others were going to beat me to the richer spoils, chose to just keep accumulating goods. Fortunately, I just had enough to keep ahead of the others and was happy to see my first victory of 2008.
Hamburgum is another game that makes good use of the rondel and I think I prefer the economic emphasis in this game slightly more than the other games. There look to be a number of different strategies to try out and it will be good to experiment with another path next time.
Next SBC session
The next session of the Shrewsbury Boardgames Club takes place at Garry’s house on Friday 8th February.
Blue Moon vs. computer opponent
This looks interesting. Pete Haselhurst mentions on his nimrods blog about this free download of Blue Moon to allow you to play against a computer opponent. All eight races are included and the AI looks as though it could be quite tough as Pete reckons it beats him every time.
Next SBC session
This week’s session of the Shrewsbury Boardgames Club will be on Friday 1st February at Garry’s house.Â
Pizza Box Football: Superbowl XLII
With the Superbowl just a week away, On The Line Games have posted team sheets for the two teams and Chris and I set out to discover who was going to be lifting the trophy in Phoenix, Arizona on 3rd February.
I hope the game turns out to be closer than our playing. Chris’s Patriots crushed my Giants in a very one sided affair. New England’s aerial attack was virtually unstoppable whereas New York’s offence just didn’t get started. At half time, the Patriots led by 31-3. The second half was a bit less embarrassing for the Giants and they did eventually get into the end zone. However, New England added another two TDs and a field goal to make the final score 48-10.
SR: 25th January 2008 – Kingsburg
This week there were five of us so I decided that it was time to break out Kingsburg, a game by new Italian designers, Andrea Chiarvesio and Luca Iennaco, and published in English by Elfinwerks.
In Kingsburg players are governors sent from the King to oversee the territories at the edge of his realm. The game takes place over five years (rounds), and in every year there are 3 production seasons for collecting resources, building structures, and training troops. The final season of the year is winter, in which all the players must fight an invading army. During the production seasons, players role dice and allocate them to influence the advisers in the King’s Council. Good dice rolling skills help but the player with the lowest influence dice sum will be the first one to choose where to spend his/her influence. Once everyone’s dice have been allocated, the advisers award different resources or allocate soldiers, victory points or other advantages to the influencing player. Players then get the chance to spend resources on buildings that give a benefit of victory points and/or help in the later stages of the game. In winter, an enemy army appears and players use their troops if they have any to try and fight them off. Win and the king rewards you, lose and the enemy makes off with resources, VPs and/or destroys buildings. At the end of five years the player with the most VPs is the winner.
In our game, Steve started out hot favourite having been the only one to have played before (3 times) with Mark G a close second favourite as it involved rolling dice. Due to my fantastic dice rolling skills, I was the only one unable to build in the first season, an insult compounded by the fact that everyone then immediately picked up a VP from the King for having most buildings. The allocation of dice is the most interesting part of the game as by careful placement, you can freeze others out of play. Steve suffered from this a couple of times early on, so much so that he announced early in the second round that he was positive he couldn’t possibly recover from such a bad position. Yes, Steve, everyone fell for that old chestnut! Nige on the other hand honed in on what certainly seemed the most powerful building track (Inn, Market, Farms) and quickly gained himself an extra white die that proved extremely useful. Rolling 17 to influence the Queen? No problem with four dice! Mark G went down the military route and was never troubled in Winter and may have been a real contender if any of the invading hordes in the first four years had been intent on wrecking buildings. As it was, it was only in the final winter when something really horrible could happen. I wasn’t too worried as we were facing demons and my Church added to my defence so I only needed two soldiers from the King to be safe and Mark G was rolling the die. However, Mark was already safe so declared that a 1 would be a good roll. Sure enough, his skill didn’t desert him so I lost 9 VPs in that oh so harsh winter. Nige’s Farms meant that he had the game sewn up pretty easily a while before the end but the threat of “Even Nige couldn’t lose it from here†meant that he took his time(!) to make sure of the win.
Kingsburg is excellent and hits just the right buttons for me. There are lots of ways to develop your capabilities and none of them can guarantee victory. A more demanding winter could have seen off Nige’s farm advantage and helped Mark G. Poor dice rolling doesn’t help but there is normally something you can do with your dice and the help of the extra die in Spring and King’s Envoy can help bring somebody who is trailing in buildings back into contention. All in all, a fine game and very nicely produced. A very strong contender for Game of the Month.
Six Picks 3: Best games of 2007
These are the best games I played in 2007, not necessarily released in that year and ignoring those that I didn’t get to play. In particular, those that may have appeared had I managed to get them to the table before the year end include Agricola (waiting for the English version), Brass (a Martin Wallace economic game) and Race for the Galaxy (a San Juan development that I have played in 2008, but needs more plays to give a decent assessment). Anyway, these are my picks:
Phoenicia is a development of Outpost that retains the flavour of the original but plays much quicker. Lots of possible paths to follow to find a winning strategy and nicely produced by JKLM.
Age of Empires III is a brilliant game based on the computer game that is beautifully produced by Tropical Games. Again, plenty of different strategies to pursue and one of the few real gamers’ games released this year that plays with six.
Caylus: Magna Carta takes the original highly rated board game, simplifies and shortens the game play to make it even better and presents it as a card game. I’m not sure I need to play the board game version again as the streamlining is superb, in much the same way as I prefer San Juan to Puerto Rico.
Notre Dame was Alea’s big release of 2007 and turned out to be another superb game. Lots to think about in this one with a nice card drafting mechanic where the cards you play are determined partly by you and partly by the player on your right. Also, the need to control your rat population gives an extra layer of tension.
1960: The Making of the President is an excellent two player area control game. The cards do a great job of instilling atmosphere with the events portrayed and getting the balance between canvassing support in the states, controlling the media and gaining the upper hand in the key policy issues.
Pillars of the Earth was a worthy winner of the 2007 Deutsche Spiel Preis as it does a great job of translating Ken Follett’s book into an engaging board game. Similar in style to the way Caylus plays, PotE succeeds in streamlining the number of choices to be made while leaving lots of tough decisions to be made.
Next SBC session
The next session of the Shrewsbury Boardgames Club will be on Friday 25th January at Garry’s house.
Board Game Internet Awards 2007
The winners of the Board Game Internet Awards for 2007 have just been announced on Boardgamenews. I’ll say more later but for now I’d just mention that Best Game Club Site went to…… Trickylight ….. -Â Listens for lower jaw hitting the ground.
I’m currently working on an acceptance speech for the glitzy awards ceremony that is bound to follow.
The full list of winners is posted here.