More of the Same, and Games

If it's 8:30, it must be a bar-mitzvah

Our dear friends had a bar-mitzvah for their (4th? 5th?) son on shabbat morning. The BM boy read beautifully and then spoke very quickly.

Shul was followed by a kiddush.

If it's 11:30, it must be another kiddush

I ran from the bar-mitzvah kiddush to the kiddush at another shul, where my wife gave a small d'var torah in honor of our dear friends who just finished walking the entire Israel trail, in order to raise money for ALS research. They completed the trail, and also (with 6 km to go) raised their target goal: $36,000, or $36 for each kilometer walked. The walkers all lost several kilos. They have a haunted look about them, like they don't know what to with themselves now that they're not hiking.

You can still contribute, of course.

If it's 7:00, it's bar-mitzvah take two

The party for the bar-mitzvah boy takes place after shabbat (sometimes later in the week) so that there can be fresh hot food, gift giving, book signing, videos, music, and microphones.

The father of the bar-mitzvah boy did the worst karaoke rendition ever of a U2 song; on the plus side, the IDF is looking into using his talents for riot control in the territories. The food and company was good, though.

And then (9:30) a shiva visit

To the friend whose father's funeral we attended on Thursday.

Games

Rachel has banished my game collection from the living room closet to the shelves near the washing machine. I admit that they fit better there. But still. The collection no longer dominates the living room. Sniff.

I didn't play anything this shabbat, but last shabbat I introduced some kids who love games, but are as of yet only familiar with mainstream games and with my game It's Alive, to Alice and Wonderland Parade (they liked it) and Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation (they loved it). They played ten games of LotR:tC, returning it to me the next day.

Weekend Gaming

We did game after all, but not as I had hoped.

The family had some young boys, ages 5 and 7. I neglected to inform them that the games closet was not a toy closet; people get easily confused about that issue.

I looked up and found him with Lord of the Rings the Confrontation open, trying to understand how to play. I tried to help, but had to convince his father after a bit that this was not for kids.

The kid himself asked, after trying to understand the game, "Don't you have anything with dice?"

And I only noticed after a few rounds of play, when he played one of his cards (and after losing Frodo twice in a row), that the card he played had a wet and ragged corner. I looked up and yes, he was biting the cards.

I put away the game and brought out Checkers for him to play with his father while I went back to the table and downed a cup of wine.

Elkins coming, shortly.

Update: The Elkins have come and gone, and we did NOT game Balderdash. Sharron insisted on us playing something called "conversation", which had totally lame rules and no freakin' tension or discernible strategy. And it was long, man, and I could never tell when it was my turn. The game ended without any clear winner (although I think I was losing).

I give it a 4 on the BGG scale. Willing to give it another shot sometime, but it need some serious rules revamping or an expansion. Even some nice bits would make it more enjoyable.

Yehuda

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

Weekend Gaming

This was a full weekend of gaming, for me. Saarya and Tal were both here for the weekend, which only happens once every three weeks.

Our guests for dinner were Zeke, who comes occasionally to the Wed night games, and his mother Mindy. Zeke is about 14 years old, by the way.

After dinner, Zeke, Mindy, Saarya, Tal and I played Zug im Zug, otherwise known as Ticket to Ride. I had played TtR:Europe at BGG.con and was hoping that this could be a game that both Tal and Saarya could enjoy. Net reaction: it's ok. Maybe we are spoiled from five years of gaming already, having broken our teeth on Settlers and Cities and Knights and so on, but TtR is not quite deep enough for us, at least on first playing.

I will say this: it is a very elegant game. It combines a very few rules for a complete game experience. There are just the right amount of decisions to be made on your turn, but not too many. And all with very few rules to the game. Add to that some nifty pieces, an educational map, and you're good to go.

However, it lacks a bit. Since you don't really know what other people need to do, blocking them is usually more of an accident, rather than educated guesswork (although there's some of that). Most of all, it lacks any sort of story arc; the game plays the same from the very beginning to the end and then it stops; then you count points. Some sort of mechanism that required an increasing minimum route length as the game progressed would be slightly more interesting. And of course, the luck of the routes is a big factor, although variants on the web are designed to solve that problem.

So let's say it's 85% of the game we want at 30% of the complexity, which is a good tradeoff. SoC is 70% of the complexity for 95% of the game. I don't think TrR will replace SoC as our introductory game of choice, but it is a strong candidate for being one of the first ones out.

Anyway, Zeke cleaned up in our first game with 115 points. I was the next closest at 88 points.

Saturday Tal brought over some friends. They played TtR again; I forget who won. After dinner we played 4-player Settlers which played ok, although one of them was more interested in the LotR:tConfrontation game I played simultaneously with Saarya. In the Settlers game, there was a lot of giggling, and one of the girls didn't really try, buying only Devel cards whenever she could. I knocked out four cities and a Longest Road.

Meanwhile, Saarya took white in LotR. This was his second game. The first time he beat me playing black. This time he beat me playing white. I must be getting old. Somehow our pieces just kept trading off until we each had three left. Unfortunately mine were not able to get to the Shire or intercept Frodo before he could waltz in.

Lastly I introduced Saarya to Maharaja, and also tried it as a 2 player game. It played pretty well, actually. We played with the variation that each player kept picking roles whenever they chose role swap until we both had three, and thereafter we traded roles. So we each had three roles from the second round onwards. We also played that the role owner had +1 in the corresponding city.

I really like the game; I like it as much as I like El Grande, and there sure are a lot of similar mechanics between the two. However, the one thing that bothers me about Maharaja is the victory conditions. Aside from the fact that the rich kind of get richer, somewhere around midgame one person gets out a palace one round earlier than the other person and that kind of wraps it up as long as he can keep doing so each round thereafter.

Which only matters because the winner is the first person with seven palaces. Two of my game group members complained about the same thing during game night and I dismissed them, but I now kind of agree with them. As a general rule in games, the mechanism for gaining resources should not be the same mechanism for victory points, unless there is a clear means of ganging up on the leader or otherwise making up for a deficiency. Settlers has the robber and trading, Power Grid has the turn order. Maharaja has the blind actions, but it's not quite enough.

In any case, it doesn't prevent me from enjoying the game; I may just have to think if there is anything I can do that would make it slightly more to our taste in victory conditions.

After shabbat I reviewed my player's character sheets and answered an email from a new potential player. The next two days are semi-vacation.

Yehuda

First of my old rulesystems

I was going through my old rulesystems ... I really like some of them. This is not totally surprising, in that I made them, so naturally they fit the idea of what I want. Yet it is, because usually you look back on things and wonder how you could have made such junk.

Anyway, I never actually played the one in the provided link. Everything is ability and skill based, no classes, and a freeform magic system.

If anyone out there knows anything about RPG systems, I would love to hear about how it sucks and all the holes and problems with it before I seriously take it out and try to use it.

Thanks,
Yehuda

P.S. I taught LotR:tC to Saarya who was over for a few hours. I played white and lost, after he picked off Sam, maneuvered a piece to Frodo's side (so Frodo couldn't retreat) and then hit him with the Flying Nazgul. It was close. I played my last card on Frodo, which was a 5, but he still had a 3.

The game is growing on me, more and more. Yet more proof that a) playing a game once or twice is not enough to give an evaluation, and b) playing new games all the time is a bad idea, because you don't really experience the game properly.

Weekend Gaming

Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation

I had played this once with my friend David. I played White and found it incredibly difficult to get anywhere. But, it was my first time. The game seemed like it still had potential, so I was hoping to play again.

I also introduced my brother Ben to the game at the game club, and he was so disgusted with the lack of symmetry and blind aspects to the game that he refused to play after one move.

This time I suggested it to my non-gamer neighbor whose family came for lunch. He has already played the Menorah Game and liked it, and I thought the association of this game with Lord of the Rings would appeal to him.

I played White again and won. Of course, this was his first time. He said it was OK, but not special. I kind of agree with him.

This looks like another victim of the overhype on BGG: "best two player game ever". No, it isn't. It is over too quickly, and it appears to be too slight a game to be that good. At least, from my limited experience.

I'm happy to play it a few more times. Here's hoping it will still be interesting after the tenth game.

Yehuda