Raanana Session Report, in which Abe wins Age of Empires III due to luck, luck, and (maybe) luck

Participants: Jon, Abraham, Sara, Peleg, Ellis, Laurie

Laurie is back from summer vacation. Sara also joined us, but opted to "join Abe's team" when we had six, and she had to take care of the baby anyway. Before settling on Age of Empires III, I set up a game of Guardians of Graxia, but we didn't get to play it (I wasn't about to try it with 5 or 6 players).

Age of Empires III

Abraham/Sara 94, Jon 91, Ellis 64, Peleg 59, Laurie 55

First plays for Laurie, Peleg, and Ellis, and second or third for Abraham and Sara. I chose this because it supports five players well and has a wee bit of combat in it. I know that Ellis and Peleg are war game fans, but I don't have many games with these elements; I'd be happy to try them on Antike. Laurie was a little nervous because it didn't look like something she would like, however.

Turned out to be a success, even with Laurie, I think. Peleg saw soldiers in his pieces and dedicated the rest of his game toward acquiring them and using them to shoot people. He did some damage, though sometimes he just shot them for the fun of it. He also had some money coming in from his soldiers discovering.

The "take $20" building didn't some out until round 2 (and I would have thrown it back to ensure that it didn't come out in round 1), and Laurie was the only one who could buy buildings in round 2. She also got the "free discovery" in round 2, making me thing that she had a decent lead at this point. However, she tried an failed to make several discoveries, often by a single person. Other people then stole those discoveries from her. This set her back.

Ellis had decent money coming in from a building in age 2 ($10 a round). I'm not sure where he went wrong, but a) he didn't seem to build up anything in particular, and b) Peleg kept shooting his guys (when he wasn't shooting mine).

That leaves me and Abe. I started unusually for me by concentrating on commodities instead of discoveries and buildings. It slowed me down for some time. Only when I got a few extra specialists and was able to take some merchant ships did I begin to pull ahead (in income, anyway). Together with placement and buildings, I was getting one of each specialist a round.

As usual, I took a number of second place victories in the New World, a position that slipped under the other players' radar, apparently. After my income was secure, I went back to concentrating on discoveries and some final buildings. The trouble was that though I at least succeeded in my discoveries, they were all low valued discoveries of 4 or 5 points.

Meanwhile, Abraham was doing as many discoveries as I was (even more) and his were all 6 or 7 points. He also ended with a lot of money. He had 61 final scoring points in discoveries, cash, and buildings, which was impressive. I came rather close to that by adding my income. However, would I have picked his cards, and he mine, the final result would have been reversed.

Or maybe not ... it's possible that if I had picked his cards that I might have failed one of the discoveries, since I generally send n-1 guys. Ok, so maybe it wasn't entirely luck.

Session Report, as well as Shabbat Gaming

The latest Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club session report is up. Games played: R-Eco, Container, Puerto Rico, Age of Empires III.

The report is pretty slight, as it's late and without notes.

Shabbat Gaming

I had many of the gaming gang over for lunch on shabbat. Games played:

Go: I played a quite satisfactory game with Adam, a player who can't make our Wed night games but comes whenever the opportunity presents itself at other times. He's quite better at Go than I am, having actually taken the time to study and practice it for a while, but he's still not a master.

As a result, for me a satisfactory game against him is that he doesn't eat the bulk of my stones in one fell swoop. He almost did, but I was able to squeak out of it. The game came down to counting stones, and he won 40 to 20 or so, but I was happy. We played on a 13x13 board.

Dominion: Also with Adam, this was first game for him, we played with around five cards from the basic set and five more from the expansions (I only rejected Black Market). Again, a nice satisfactory game feeling. Adam won with 5 provinces to my three and a duchy.

Container: Having played on Wed for the first time, five of them played this after lunch, and it took a long time. However, they all appeared to enjoy it and the game did not appear to be a blowout for anyone. Everyone expected Abraham to win because a) it was his game, and b) he tends to win calculating games, but he only came in fourth. Nadine won.

Nadine says: I focused on getting containers on the island, as well as money. On Shabbat we took turns overpaying for auctions, though on one of my over-payments, Shirley the auctioneer bought it, which she didn't do any other time at high prices, or even lower. Abe and Bill tied twice on an auction, and Shirley picked Abe to win it, expensive for him though it was 5 containers. Nadine says that she likes the game.

I played half a game on Friday evening (it was late), and my only fully-formed thought on the game is that it plays a whole lot like a Splotter game: unintuitive actions that don't seem to have much to do with your goals, but appear to gel elegantly after several plays. It's intriguing, I'll give it that. I still have no idea what's flying.

Stone Age: Four people played this one, but one left in the middle. I think Sarah won, followed by Shani, and then Ksenia. Second play for Shani (she is not a gamer and generally only plays when one of her children makes her, but she got into gaming this shabbat, which was nice), first for Ksenia.

Age of Empires III: It was me, Adam, Ksenia, Shani, and Sarah. First play for everyone except for me. First five-player game for me.

I'm happy to say that AoE3 seems to work well for 2-5 players. There is less to the worker placement and more to the conflict with 2 players, but there was some conflict here, too. Two three-player games I played had no conflict at all, and the four-player game had very little.

The worker placement aspect is more pronounced in five-player, and money was often tighter. No one bought more than two of the third age bonus buildings, for example.

I won with 97 points to 90 and some 80s (Ksenia scored less). I took the early $20 bonus, which I think is not a balanced building, really. I ended up with some bonus soldiers, so I sent them to the new world for money, the occasional swing in area control, and the bonus building that gives points for soldiers. It took some time for my income to get off the ground, but eventually I got the $10/round building, which helped a lot.

Sarah was the income queen, and Adam was my other foe in soldiers (hmmm, both the boys at the table ended up with the soldiers, as opposed to the other three players who were girls ...), but we never shot each other. Shani had the least buildings, but took the bonus building that gave points for "number of buildings" to prevent any of us from taking it (and was only a few points less than any other building would have given her).

Two-Player Age of Empires III

It's been about five years since my step-son last played a game with me. He is into computer games (and was into Warhammer). He never liked Euros (except Settlers when he was little), CCGs, or anything that didn't involve visceral killing and complex war strategies.

Upon recommendations, I picked up Age of Empires III on my last visit to the US. While I understood that it is a Euro, I also hoped it might tempt my step-son, who had played the computer game, and who had, at least, looked curiously at some of my other recent Euros that sported pictures of generals and armies (though typically had no combat). So I was thrilled that he was willing to try it.

AoE3 (at least, for two players) is not really a war game, less of one than either Antike or what I remember of Wallenstein (played once about four years ago). But the combat is in there, and we did use it; actually I used it first and more viciously than he did. I'm a big fan of "remove one for one" combat in comparison to dice rolling; my step-son prefers the dice rolling.

Actually, AoE3 is a game of worker-placement, resource-management, and area control. The object is to earn the most victory points, which you get from a) buildings (ala Puerto Rico and Caylus), b) areas discovered, c) your end-of-the-game income (excepting any bonuses from buildings), and d) three times during the game from areas controlled.

Each round you have five guys to allocate between a) turn order, b) moving to the areas, c) adding guys to your contingent ready to discover an area/discovering an area, d) buying a building, e) getting an additional special guy to use next round, f) taking an income source, or g) declaring your intention to battle.

The income sources are various commodities, which you can also get from discovering one of the areas on the board, as well as one "wild" commodity. Three of any commodity gives you $1 income, three of a kind gives $3, and four of a kind gives $6. Money is good for buying buildings, declaring a total war on another player (rare), or (useful only in a game with multiple players) one space that lets you buy a special guy for use on the next round.

The special guys are worth double value, or give you income once, or can be used to shoot the other player's guys in an area during a battle.

Each area has an initially-secret strength you have to overcome during discovery (essentially, how many Indians you have to slaughter :-( ). When you run out of areas, you can still discover areas off the board for more victory points, but you don't actually move guys to them. Control of an area is worth 6 points, second place is 2 points; this is counted three times during the game.

In our game, we both scored about equal for this over the three scorings.

At the end of the game, you also score your income levels. I scored a bit higher for that. You also score your discovered territories. Again I scored a bit higher for that.

Lastly you score your buildings. The big point-scoring buildings only appear in the last two round of the game, so it is essential to be first or second to claim these in one of these rounds. My step-son miscalculated the importance of these, and his buildings only amounted to some 17 points total, while mine totaled some 35 or 40. Earlier buildings give you bonus cash, bonus guys each round, bonus income, etc...

Oh yes, combat. If you declared combat, you can pick one player in one region and have each of your soldiers in that region remove one of the other player's guys. If you pay $10, you may instead declare total war against a player and have this occur in every region of the board. I killed a few of his guys first, and then he loaded the board up with more soldiers. The object, of course, is to be the one with the most in an area during scoring turns.

The game is a scant 8 turns long. The entire game took us about 45 minutes on our first play, which was impressive, maybe even a little too short. We could both tell that the game becomes richer and more competitive with multiple players, so probably 4 or 5 players is ideal.

I quite enjoyed it, and my step-son thought it was a good game, though he would have liked more dice and more combat. I'm looking forward to trying it out with the game group.

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This week has been overwhelming: I'm essentially working two jobs (I missed a lot of work in the US), keeping up my blogging, fixing a whole lot of things, dealing with various money issues, and cleaning for Pesach while the wife is away (coming on Friday). And I started the week with a bad stomach virus of some kind.

I had to cancel both game night this week and games day I usually host over Pesach. Luckily, one of my gamers is hosting a smaller version of games day at her house, which I will try to attend after work next week.

A video review of It's Alive.