Two Player Mykerinos

I rarely get to sit down and play a game with Saarya, for some reason, but we got in a game of Mykerinos last night. This was his first play.

Turned out to be quite a good experience.

In my previous games, all of us rushed to the museum. The groupthink is is that museum space is a finite, scarce resource, while tiles are renewable and less scarce. As a result, the Brown bonus tiles did little good for anybody.

This time I played without rushing to the museum, seeing as it was a 2-player game, anyway. As a result, the Brown tiles became critical in Saarya taking over the game from me.

It seems to me that if you don't go for the museum early, and someone else does, you're essentially screwed. I can't see any reason not to do it.

I do think that the 3 spaces in the museum are somewhat undervalued. And I repeat what I said a long time ago, that an open-ended value track instead of the museum would have made the game a little more strategically interesting.

But it still played well. Most importantly in two-player, all that matters is the point differential for each tile pick or action, so the entire last turn's decisions were entirely calculable. Nevertheless, it was still complex enough to be fun.


Boing Boing hit several game-related sites in the last week. This one about using games to power solutions for AI problems is one I covered before, I think. Can't seem to find it.

And this RPG about gaining experience when you do household chores follows a board game I once covered on the same subject (ah, here it is: Spintastik).

Israel will be having a Poker tournament Sept 28-30 with 100,000 NIS in prizes (link is in Hebrew).

Yehuda