Shamelessly Tooting My Horn

(Written in order to cheer myself up)

My brother called me with his and his children's assessment of last Saturday night's gaming.

They thought St Pete was deeply flawed. The mechanics seemed ok, but the blue cards were not worth anything, the luck of the draw and too powerful cards swung the game, and the game was too short. They suggested doubling the value of blue buildings, eliminating some cards, and finding a way to make the game longer.

They thought Torres was ok and would like to try again, but they suspected that the game will tend to drag as people think about what to do (this was their first experience with an "action point" game).

The game they liked most was my Menorah game; they said it was short, easy to teach, but still involved some nice thought. However, they had some suggestions: the person who ends up getting a lot of low cards has a strong chance of winning, which is too luck driven - maybe I can change the card distribution to a bell curve? Also that they don't see that people will buy cards from the discard pile often. Also that maybe the soldiers could all be valued 6 but can be used to draw any card from a discard pile (i.e. even a higher valued one). And wouldn't it be nice to combine cards so that you don't end up buying useless cards.

As for his first complaint, the simple answer is to play with the advanced scoring rules. As for the last complaint, I pointed out that the possibility of useless cards is one of the central mechanisms to the decision making process in a good auction and changing that would wreck the game. As for the others, I'm willing to let him try them out and report back to me ;-) .

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FWIW, I'm still number one on PR game.com (formerly www.puertoricogame.net). If I don't play any more games, I may stay there for a while, but others are creeping up in ratings and likely to overtake me soon enough.

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Hey, you! I would be much obliged if all those of you to whom I link would be kind enough to link back to me, assuming you like my blog. We love eyeballs.

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"Hey, Jon. Let's watch a movie."

Time to go ...

Yehuda