My guests were not the gaming type, but that doesn't mean I couldn't sneak in a little.
First of all, I wanted to try playing Tichu with Tal, only to discover that it is from 3 to 10 players (and other than the 6 player variant of the standard game, the other versions look awful). One would think that you could play two player Tichu similar to the way you play Honeymoon Bridge.
So we played 24/7. One thing about the game: There's little setup, it's easy to teach, and it plays quickly.
We later tried to play El Caballero. It is a game that I've never been able to finish before because something always comes up. Another player arrives, or so on. This time I realized why. It's really not any better than Carcassone. In fact, Carcassonne is better. And the later versions of Carcassonne are probably even better yet. Oh well. Anyone want to trade Carcassonne the City for El Caballero?
It's also a member of the "the box is 2.5 times bigger than it ought to be" club.
Another of my Menorah game has been claimed. I'm pleased. I'm just hoping someone can convince someone to finally invest in making a proper version. I promise all people who purchase the mock-up version a discount on the real thing, if it ever sees print.
Links:
A blog called More Than a Living uses the idea of changing and creating variants for board games as an important skill for applying to the rest of our lives in Same Board, Different Game. One reason why electronic games are not going to be as good as physical analog games, at least until they become infinitely malleable.
CIVIO is a rummy game whose cards reflect issues of civil rights, supreme court decisions, and related concepts.
Sandy Antunes in his weekly column on RPG.net talks about how parents need to teach games and not just throw them at their kids, and also gives a rummy variant for Apples to Apples.
Yehuda
Showing posts with label el caballero. Show all posts
Showing posts with label el caballero. Show all posts
Saturday, December 09, 2006
Saturday, June 17, 2006
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.
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.
Saturday, May 13, 2006
Weekend Gaming
I had high gaming expectations for the weekend, since my guests included Nadine from the game group, Mace and his three kids who are also gamers, and three game-curious students of Rachel's.
Mace and the kids arrived before lunch, and while waiting for Rachel to return from shul, we started a few games. The kids played Settlers of Catan, which disintegrated into some sort of fight by the time lunch started. Meanwhile, I introduced Mace to Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation.
Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation
I explained the game and took the dark pieces, while Mace fretted over the seeming imbalance of forces arrayed against him. Then he waltzed into the dark forces with Aragorn and proceeded to wreak havoc with a series of well-timed card choices.
Saruman managed to make a small comeback by killing a few lost Hobbits, but I was still down to three pieces late in the game. Fortunately, they were close to the Shire. We each had two cards left. He had a 1 and a 5, while I had a 3 and "ignore text on his card", which was effectively a 0.
I made the mistake of flying into the Shire with my Nazgul. I played my 3, but if he had responded with his 5, the game would have been over, with me having no way of stopping Frodo from waltzing into Mordor. But he played his 1. I was now able to walk into the Shire faster than he could get to Mordor. Mace said that he had forgotten about that alternate win situation, so we split the win.
El Caballero
Nadine, Mace, Shachar, and I sat down to play this little cousin of El Grande. It holds more similarity with Carcassonne, however. It's much better than the latter (which I think is good), but nowhere near the former at first glance.
The game consists of a number of land/water tiles, eight caballero tiles for each player, some ship markers, and some castillo markers. The caballero tiles are identical, and are all numbered 1-4 around the sides on one side of the tile, and 5-8 on the other side.
During the game, the map builds in the center of the board, consisting of both land/water tiles and your caballero tiles. Ship and castillo markers are placed onto your scoring tiles, ship tokens on the side of a tile covering a number, and castillo markers in the center of the tile.
Like other games of this sort, let's first start with the scoring rules, after which the mechanics will make more sense. There are two scoring rounds, after the fourth and seventh round. During scoring, for any water area touched by your caballero tile, you score the number of water tiles in the area times the number of ship tokens on your caballero tile adjacent to the area. For any land area touching your scoring marker, you score double its size if you have the highest numerical value on the sides of your caballero tiles adjacent to the area, single if second highest, or nothing at all.
Which is to say that water areas share all points without any conflict, and land areas must be contested.
Each round, you all play cards for bidding, which indicate both the order you play during the round and the number of caballeros you have to play with that round (you may also have some remaining caballeros from previous rounds). During your turn, you adjust your caballero count according to your bid card (using any spare caballero tiles to keep count), must place a tile on the board, may adjust the position of caballero tiles already in place or may add new ones to the board, by paying for these actions from your caballero supply. You may also deduct caballeros to add ships or castillos to your caballero tiles in play. Castillo tokens "protect" your caballero investments, as follows.
All caballero tiles can only have one face touching land. If a tile is placed that causes the tile to have two faces touching land, the caballero tile is lost. If you have a castillo on the tile, the invested caballeros and any ships on the tile are returned to your court; otherwise, they are returned to the general supply.
So the basic tactics of the game are to ensure that no one can place tiles so as to knock away your existing caballero tiles in place. The basic strategies are to achieve high scoring water areas or control of high scoring land areas.
There is more control here regarding tile selection than in Carcassonne, both because you select your tile from a pool of face up tiles instead of picking from the draw pile, and because you auction to determine the turn order in selecting these tiles. But the geometry of the available tiles can still make the difference between being able to secure an area or not.
Still, as I liked Carcassonne (actually, Carcassonne H&G), I like El Caballero. It is certainly a more substantial game, with a great many more options to do on your round, and some interesting tactical side-effects owing to the way the rotation of the caballero tiles interact on the board. I wouldn't pay top dollar for it, however. If you don't like Carcassonne, I can't see liking this game that much more. OTOH, Nadine likes the game, and didn't like Carcassonne, so there you go.
In our game, we were only able to play until the end of round four before Nadine had to go. I held a marginal lead at that point. Nadine had secured some water points, but I was able to secure the largest land area in a way that just barely kept both Mace and Shachar at bay, although it took a long time to convince them that this was so.
Amun Re, Yinsh, By Hook or By Crook
While we were playing El Caballero, Rachel's students decided that Amun Re was the coolest looking first Eurogame to play. And had a very good time. They pretty much got the hang of it by the end of the first round, and happily played to the end with out any major problems. The one who received the most cash at mid-game ended up winning at the end.
Two of them then played a game of Yinsh while some of us went for a walk. When we came back, the Yinsh players had taken out By Hook or By Crook. I warned them that the game wasn't up to the standards of the other games they had seen, but we played anyway. I took the game, and they both pretty much agreed with my assessment by the end of it.
Tadhg Kelly, on his video gaming blog particleblog, asserts that an interviewer can determine if a candidate is a good video game designer by sticking him in a room for four hours with a blank deck of cards, some dice, and some tokens and asking him or her to create a unique and enjoyable game from scratch.
"If the game that he invents is fun (or potentially fun), then he has talent. If it is not, then he does not."
Ah, if only it were that easy to create a good game. I wonder who retains the rights to these interview creations.
Yehuda
Technorati tags: board games, board game
Mace and the kids arrived before lunch, and while waiting for Rachel to return from shul, we started a few games. The kids played Settlers of Catan, which disintegrated into some sort of fight by the time lunch started. Meanwhile, I introduced Mace to Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation.
Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation
I explained the game and took the dark pieces, while Mace fretted over the seeming imbalance of forces arrayed against him. Then he waltzed into the dark forces with Aragorn and proceeded to wreak havoc with a series of well-timed card choices.
Saruman managed to make a small comeback by killing a few lost Hobbits, but I was still down to three pieces late in the game. Fortunately, they were close to the Shire. We each had two cards left. He had a 1 and a 5, while I had a 3 and "ignore text on his card", which was effectively a 0.
I made the mistake of flying into the Shire with my Nazgul. I played my 3, but if he had responded with his 5, the game would have been over, with me having no way of stopping Frodo from waltzing into Mordor. But he played his 1. I was now able to walk into the Shire faster than he could get to Mordor. Mace said that he had forgotten about that alternate win situation, so we split the win.
El Caballero
Nadine, Mace, Shachar, and I sat down to play this little cousin of El Grande. It holds more similarity with Carcassonne, however. It's much better than the latter (which I think is good), but nowhere near the former at first glance.
The game consists of a number of land/water tiles, eight caballero tiles for each player, some ship markers, and some castillo markers. The caballero tiles are identical, and are all numbered 1-4 around the sides on one side of the tile, and 5-8 on the other side.
During the game, the map builds in the center of the board, consisting of both land/water tiles and your caballero tiles. Ship and castillo markers are placed onto your scoring tiles, ship tokens on the side of a tile covering a number, and castillo markers in the center of the tile.
Like other games of this sort, let's first start with the scoring rules, after which the mechanics will make more sense. There are two scoring rounds, after the fourth and seventh round. During scoring, for any water area touched by your caballero tile, you score the number of water tiles in the area times the number of ship tokens on your caballero tile adjacent to the area. For any land area touching your scoring marker, you score double its size if you have the highest numerical value on the sides of your caballero tiles adjacent to the area, single if second highest, or nothing at all.
Which is to say that water areas share all points without any conflict, and land areas must be contested.
Each round, you all play cards for bidding, which indicate both the order you play during the round and the number of caballeros you have to play with that round (you may also have some remaining caballeros from previous rounds). During your turn, you adjust your caballero count according to your bid card (using any spare caballero tiles to keep count), must place a tile on the board, may adjust the position of caballero tiles already in place or may add new ones to the board, by paying for these actions from your caballero supply. You may also deduct caballeros to add ships or castillos to your caballero tiles in play. Castillo tokens "protect" your caballero investments, as follows.
All caballero tiles can only have one face touching land. If a tile is placed that causes the tile to have two faces touching land, the caballero tile is lost. If you have a castillo on the tile, the invested caballeros and any ships on the tile are returned to your court; otherwise, they are returned to the general supply.
So the basic tactics of the game are to ensure that no one can place tiles so as to knock away your existing caballero tiles in place. The basic strategies are to achieve high scoring water areas or control of high scoring land areas.
There is more control here regarding tile selection than in Carcassonne, both because you select your tile from a pool of face up tiles instead of picking from the draw pile, and because you auction to determine the turn order in selecting these tiles. But the geometry of the available tiles can still make the difference between being able to secure an area or not.
Still, as I liked Carcassonne (actually, Carcassonne H&G), I like El Caballero. It is certainly a more substantial game, with a great many more options to do on your round, and some interesting tactical side-effects owing to the way the rotation of the caballero tiles interact on the board. I wouldn't pay top dollar for it, however. If you don't like Carcassonne, I can't see liking this game that much more. OTOH, Nadine likes the game, and didn't like Carcassonne, so there you go.
In our game, we were only able to play until the end of round four before Nadine had to go. I held a marginal lead at that point. Nadine had secured some water points, but I was able to secure the largest land area in a way that just barely kept both Mace and Shachar at bay, although it took a long time to convince them that this was so.
Amun Re, Yinsh, By Hook or By Crook
While we were playing El Caballero, Rachel's students decided that Amun Re was the coolest looking first Eurogame to play. And had a very good time. They pretty much got the hang of it by the end of the first round, and happily played to the end with out any major problems. The one who received the most cash at mid-game ended up winning at the end.
Two of them then played a game of Yinsh while some of us went for a walk. When we came back, the Yinsh players had taken out By Hook or By Crook. I warned them that the game wasn't up to the standards of the other games they had seen, but we played anyway. I took the game, and they both pretty much agreed with my assessment by the end of it.
Tadhg Kelly, on his video gaming blog particleblog, asserts that an interviewer can determine if a candidate is a good video game designer by sticking him in a room for four hours with a blank deck of cards, some dice, and some tokens and asking him or her to create a unique and enjoyable game from scratch.
"If the game that he invents is fun (or potentially fun), then he has talent. If it is not, then he does not."
Ah, if only it were that easy to create a good game. I wonder who retains the rights to these interview creations.
Yehuda
Technorati tags: board games, board game
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