Shabbat Gaming

Eitan, Emily, and Nadine came to Raanana for shabbat. We played at Abraham and Sarah's on Friday night. For Sat lunch and games, Elli and Susan joined us at my house.

Friday night Abraham, Eitan, Emily, Nadine, and I ran though a few rounds of Caylus Magna Carta, the card game version of the board game Caylus. First play for everyone. Nadine and I teamed up, and we only played through three rounds so as to get the idea.

Caylus the board game is a worker placement game with complicated moving parts. Five different colors of cubes, five different colors of buildings, dozens of building types, tons of little interactions. There is a series of favor tracks, castle tracks, turn order and passing order tracks, and so on. You have to get these cubes to get that building to play on this building to get these cubes (and money) to get that building to get one of these buildings. Each building needs more cash and or cubes.

I find Caylus to be too long and finicky for what it is, which is a decent worker placement game. And I'm not thrilled about the provost mechanic, over which you sometimes have little control. But it's ok as a two or three player game. More than that and I'll bring a book to the table and read while waiting for everyone else to think through their turns: I'll probably lose, but there's a limit to how much time I'm willing to invest in figuring out the right move. Too often a designer mistakes "complicated" for "strategic".

Caylus Magna Carta appears to clear up some of the problems with the original board game. It dispenses with the bailiff (the other white guy), the favors, the having to play in the castle, the other half a dozen irrelevant buildings like turn order, and so on. Instead it introduces a random card draw - annoying, but it's not clear that some cards are necessarily better than other cards, so no complaint.

CMC appears to be shorter and play quicker, while preserving the basic worker placement, cube collection, and building upgrade mechanisms. We had finished the first phase of the castle by turn three.

I had a green building in play, but was well away from getting a blue one. I'm wondering how likely I would have been able to get out one or two blue buildings by the time the players concentrating on building the castle would have been able to end the game. I suspect not very likely, which makes me question the viability of pursuing blue buildings altogether. On the other hand, I have to trust that the game isn't THAT badly imbalanced. So we'll see.

First player has a huge advantage, being the only one with easy access to stone on the first round. In Caylus, the first player advantage is taken care of by giving successively more money to the other players in turn order. It seems patently obvious that this should be the rule in this game, as well. Abraham went first and, as a result of turn order, he was killing us by the end of the first, second, and third rounds. Maybe I misread something in the rules.

Still, I'm willing to give it a full try, especially as the turn order problem is easily solvable. The game still has the provost, a mechanic that kind of works but I don't really like.

After lunch, Ellis, Susan, Eitan, and Emily played Taj Mahal. I quickly taught them the game, although some of them had played once before. I didn't catch the final scores. Everyone seemed to get the hang of it.

Abraham went out for a short time, so Nadine, Sarah, and I played Through the Desert while waiting for him to return. TtD is a camel placement game where you extend your five camel trains (only two placements each turn) to touch oases and cordon off areas of the board before other people can block you. It has several different avenues for scoring points.

Nadine had played only once before, a long while ago. Sarah gave her a series of rules reminders in no particular order. I could have reminded Nadine about certain scoring opportunities to remember during play, but I didn't, so I squeaked out a victory over the two of them (71, 69, 66).

Abraham returned and the four of us played Tobago. First play for Abraham and Sarah. It's been a while since either Nadine or I played. We removed the curses before starting. This decrease one of the unfair luck elements, though it also allows for very long treasure maps to grow.

Tobago has a nifty card play mechanic: you are hunting for four treasures on an island . Each card indicates a condition about a treasure, and you can play the card onto any of the four treasure hint piles. Each card placed om a treasure hint pile has to narrow the possible locations on the board at which that treasure might be located. So one card might say "Not on in the biggest mountain range" and the next might say "within two spaces of a hut"; both of these cards played to the same treasure hint pile mean that that treasure must be located somewhere on the board at a location that satisfies both of these conditions. Players continue playing cards until only a single possible locations remains, at which point whomever wants to can (instead of playing a card) pick up the treasure. The loot is then divided among the person who picked it up and all players who have played cards to that treasure, one share per card played. After treasures are located, amulets that give free turns or other benefits appear on the island at known but changing locations.

Nadine was sure that concentrating on getting amulets was the key to victory, so she went straight to a point on the board where an amulet was going to appear. After the first treasure scoring, she was no longer sure about this, since it took time to get the amulets in return for which she scored less points. I don't know. I think giving up a turn now for utility later can be worthwhile, but it depends on the circumstances.

Nadine's was the only amulet collected after the first treasure, so there were five amulets on the board after the second one. I picked up one, then used it to pick up the second, and so on all the way across the board, taking five amulets and using four of them. I wouldn't call the amulet mechanic broken, but I don't really like things that can be collected without limit, used without limit, and give you entire turns for free. It disrupts too much of the game.

I'm also not happy with the "last player who collects a treasure starts the next one" rule, since the last person to collect a treasure is often the one who scored most, rather than least, and so doesn't deserve this arbitrary advantage. I think this rule was meant to benefit the loser; I could be wrong. It doesn't, in any case.

What I love about the game is the card play mechanic; even though the game is fairly dull otherwise, the card play is great. It would make a great solo puzzle game of some kind.

Update: I forgot that Emily and Eitan played a few games of Saikoro. Too bad the company that made the game went out of business. Still a cute game.

Weekend Gaming

I introduced Saarya to 2 player Caylus on Friday evening. Unfortunately, we started pretty late and by the end of the first scoring he was too tired to continue. He enjoyed it, although not enthusiastically (willing to play again). Caylus appears to be a game that can only be played with other people who really, really like it and are willing to devote the time required for it. This makes it different from the other top games, like Puerto Rico or El Grande.

It is more in league with Die Macher. Die Macher is also way too long, and an even longer game, but it feels less fiddly and lighter than Caylus. Still, both games feel like work by the end.

I also played a 2-player game of Puerto Rico with Rachel. We hadn't played in a good month and she requested it. We played with our standard set of my replacement buildings and rule changes.

It looked like a tight game for much of it. I was sure she had made a mistake with an early Hospice, but she used it highly effectively, pulling corns and quarries or loaded plantations against manned production buildings. The purchase set her back one round in money, which she quickly made up with a solid trade.

By the end game, I could already see that she was going to be ahead about 10 victory points in shipping. My only hope was to get two more large buildings than her, but no matter how I arranged it, she could match me. I ended up with 1 more large building, but she had many other small ones. Final score was 67 to 56.

Yehuda

Weekend Gaming

For lunch we had over a good gaming crowd: Nadine, Brendan, and Josh from the group, as well as my son's friend and her parents. I was looking forward to some nice games in the afternoon.

We opened with Apples to Apples, both because Brendan wanted to play and we never get to play at the group, and because we had a chance to hook in the non-gamers for a few rounds. It was the quickest A2A games I've ever played. Seven players, and it lasted 9 apples. The mom got 3, Eitan won with 4, Eitan's friend got 1, and 1 other went to someone.

[Side note: Apparently, there are Yiddish and Jewish versions of this game, and they are working on a Hebrew one (actually, the work is outsourced). I suggested to them to make an Israeli one in Hebrew, with Hebrew and Israeli cultural references. Has anyone seen any of these versions? Or are they still in production?]

Anyway, they left, and we took the time to get to know the game Lift Off, which we only briefly tried at the group. It is a simultaneous quick-play game (like Spit), but a cute game for all that. Each player has planets on which to play his cards, and another player is also playing on the same planet. You turn over your deck, and for each card you can either play on a planet, cycle under the deck, or discard.

The first trick is that blue cards only go on planets or other blue cards, a single yellow card goes on a blue card, and red cards go onto yellow or red cards. The first to finish his deck yells "stop", and play has to stop.

You then get points for having played a sufficient number of blue cards to support the red cards that you played. I.e. you will score a red card only if certain number of blue cards were played as well. To complicate matters, each planet has different requirements, and the cards played by one of your opponents on the same planet can affect your score on that planet.

It is a hard game to master quickly, but after few rounds you begin to make heads and tails of what cards need to go where. It is fun, but you have to like that kind of pressure and quickness thing.

After that we played El Caballero. I had only played it one time and thought that it was a glorified Carcassonne. I liked it, but I was hoping to find more to the game. I was very surprised to find it.

For some reason, the previous games that I played had open boards where the caballero tiles didn't really crowd out the play area. In this game, the players played many caballero tiles to the point that the available locations to play were very constrained. This made for super-interesting gameplay, rather than the opposite. Since you can do actions in any order, you could sometimes block off the entire board with caballero cards before having to play your tile, which could then be played on the other side of any of your cards.

It all got very interesting. Once again, we had to end the game at the end of the first scoring round. Nadine was leading. I have to up my assessment of the game. And we still haven't even tried the expansion parts to the game.

Nadine had to go, and Brendan and Josh tried two player Lift Off while I excused myself. When I returned, I tried them on 3 player Caylus. Neither of them had played before, while I had not tried it 3 player. We made it almost to the second scoring in about an hour and a half. Brendan was entirely bored, while I was happy, and Josh looked somewhere in between. Caylus just isn't doing it. It really is a bit too long, and too fiddly.

To end the evening, we played two hands of Rook. The we briefly went out to the Israeli book fair.

Neither my Ethics 6.0 nor my Web 3.0 articles have received much in the way of comments. Oh well. You write what you have to write, and hope it connects. I welcome any comments you may have about either of them.

Meanwhile, after being a runner up on one of the headline contests on Overheard in New York, I was invited to apply as a headline writer for their new version, Overheard on the Beach. We'll see how that goes.

Note: I forgot to add that I played a few games of Magic with Josh before lunch. I taught him how to Rochester draft. That, and the fact that he hasn't played in five years and was used to sixty card decks, didn't serve him well. My deck was fairly neat and tuned, heavy with fliers and easily walked him. He had too little mana in both games, first because he didn't add enough, and second because his cards cost too much to cast.

His Magic collection consists of about three decks and an Illusionary Mask.

Midway between Monopoly and Chess

First off, a side note about my reading material.

There but for fortune

My Mom sometimes gives me some of her old Discover magazines, some of which I took for reading material. It was going to be a long weekend with little Internet access, and I couldn't count on playing games, so I brought these, as well as a newspaper and the final book of a sci-fi series I was reading.

One of the articles in one of the Discovery's was this one on the physics of bras. In order to learn about how bras work, and to study the natural tendency of breasts to sag, some scientists conducted numerous studies of woman jogging topless or with dozens of different types of bras, with light diodes arranged over various parts of the breasts to track their movements.

And all I kept thinking while I was reading this was: holy ****, am I in the wrong line of work.

There but for fortune, 2

This feeling was repeated when we went to the jacuzzi. The jacuzzi and dead sea pools are free, but if you want to have your body covered in mud, have someone hold their hands over your back and move them in circles, or place hot stones on your head, you have to pay $40 to $90.

Mud. Circles. Rocks. What the hell am I doing working in computers?

The Trade Pact Universe

These three books by Julie E. Czerneda are top notch books that explore humanity through the lens of a number of different alien psychologies (as do many good sci-fi books). They are great pieces of solid writing and skillful sensibility. She never hits you over the head with messages or panders to baser thrills. Yet the stories are thrilling.

The second one is the weakest one, as the tension in the plot is not that tense, since the reader knows what is going on long before the protagonist does. But overall, just lovely. Seek them out.

Apples to Apples

Although we went on a hike on Friday morning, the company didn't provide any team-building experiences, which was a little odd. So it was up to me to bring people together. Luckily I had brought Apples to Apples.

I found Yoav and his wife again on Friday night in a mess of people inside the lounge. When I saw Yoav, he asked me if I had brought a game, and at the word game, several bored people in the group perked up their ears. We started with six players, and a seventh joined us midgame. There were several curious onlookers, as well.

It was a big hit. I really don't know why there is no Hebrew version of this, yet (Hmm, I think I'll fire off an email and find out), but Israelis love American culture and most can read English well enough, especially those working in a tech company. The truth is, I think the game is cute but not really all that cute, but they loved it.

Like most people, most of my cards weren't very useful, but I did have some beautiful matches. For "powerful" I played "television". The next word was "idiotic", and I couldn't replay the same card, but I did have "Barney". Another one was "marriage" onto the word "hopeless".

Because of this, I pulled in 4 cards first, but we just kept playing until it got late.

Midway between Monopoly and Chess

I'm getting better at describing my hobby in a way that actually engenders respect, as opposed to bemusement. My latest is as follows:

You know how in every field there are some people who seek out the absolute best of certain type of items? You know, like people who know the best wines, or collect the best art replicas? Well, that's what I do with games. I find and collect the absolute best games in the world; games from Europe, Britain, Germany, Italy, and so on, that you can't find at your local toy stores.

They are games for adults like Chess, but they look a bit more like Monopoly. Monopoly is a luck game, the best game for kids, but really, there's not much to the game. Chess is a game you have to study all of your life that has no luck. These games are sort of midway between Monopoly and Chess: full of strategy, but you don't have to learn them your whole life to enjoy them. And they are quicker to play, are culturally interesting, and a lot of fun.

Caylus

I am always trying to find another game to play with Rachel other than Puerto Rico. It's not that we don't keep playing it, it's that the same game over and over can make one feel tired of it. When we get tired of it, that means that we don't play it for a week or so and then we play again.

It would be nice to have a second game. Actually, we also will occasionally play Scrabble. But I mean a second Eurogame.

I was hoping Caylus would do it, just like I hoped Tigris and Euphrates or Goa would do it. Rachel didn't connect with Tigris and Euphrates, and Goa she said was ok but fiddly, which is about what I feel.

She didn't like Caylus on her first play, she said that it reminded her of Goa, only worse; it's very very fiddly. Collect the little cubes, play the little cubes, collect the other little cubes, trade for coins, trade back for cubes, buy a building, place the house. And so on.

It doesn't help that the main mechanic of the game is to try to trick you into forgetting something so that you smack your head later and say "I forgot that I needed this/wasn't going to get that!" It just doesn't inspire love.

I'm also feeling a bit of that, although after my third play, now, you get used to the patterns on the board, the paths of play, and so on, and this becomes less of an issue. As this was her first game, I pretty well slaughtered her, which also didn't help, I'm sure.

She asked how Nadine felt about it, and said that she would be willing to try one more time, on the assumption that her feeling of fiddlyness may go down on the second play. But it doesn't look like Puerto Rico is in much danger of losing its throne any time soon.

Puerto Rico

To make up for this, Rachel insisted that we play PR later in the day. I brought out only our classic set of buildings. We started playing while I was completely distracted and the game wasn't even set up properly yet, and I picked two incorrect roles in a row (which I wasn't intending on picking).

I complained and we started again. This time I was more in control of the situation, and at least picked what I was intending on picking. In a two player game, I like to start with Settler/corn if it is available, rather than Settler/quarry (we don't play with Small Market). Unfortunately it wasn't. I took Settler/quarry, she manned her corn and my quarry, and I took Large Indigo.

I ended up with indigo and tobacco, while she had corn, sugar, and tobacco. No coffee. I got an early Large Business, and she took an early Hospice. Sometimes an early Hospice can be devastating (we play that you can move a colonist onto it immediately), but not this time. I mayored whenever it didn't help her, and settled whenever it didn't help her.

She bought a Discretionary Hold which never came into play. The colonists quickly dwindled, and I was ahead in cash. With Large Business, I was able to compete with shipping and build a big building. The game ended before she could do the same.

But it was a good weekend. Good food and too much of it. Lots of sleep. It felt like a real vacation. Of course, the sad part about vacations is that they end too soon.

Yehuda

Session Report - more Caylus thoughts

Report available here. I do a further analysis of Caylus. Note that I haven't read anyone else's thoughts on Caylus yet, so I may be repeating what others have said, or I may be saying something original.

Games played: Yinsh, Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation, Puerto Rico x 2, El Caballero, Caylus, Thurn and Taxis.

Link: A blog devoted to "strange" party games called Strange Games.

Yehuda

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