Weekend Gaming

First of all, my second boing from Boing Boing (for the previous article) is producing very different traffic patterns from the first one.

Last time, most of the traffic was directly from boingboing.net or from a Spanish equivalent microservios.com . This time the majority of traffic is coming from livejournal users reading BB as a feed using the "friends" feature. How strange. Are there so many new livejournal users? So many livejournal readers who read BB? So many people who no longer read BB on their web site? Or is this just a weekend traffic pattern?

Anyhoo ...

There was a lot of gaming this weekend at my house. I taught Tal how to play two-player Pinochle, one of the few reasonably good mainstream two-player cards games that I know. We also hosted guests for the weekend: David and Evida (non-gamers) and their daughter Adi.

Tal and Adi played many games, including Gin Rummy, Set, Oh Hell, Havoc, and Yinsh.

For Saturday lunch we had even more guests: Avi, Shari, and Amitai. Avi I had introduced to Settlers of Catan many years ago and they still often play it at their house. I haven't quite gotten him past it to new games, yet, although his kids have played a few other games, here and there. I had some success today.

First off, I got David (a minor miracle) and Avi and Adi and Tal playing Apples to Apples. Everyone loved it, even David. Amitai and Saarya joined for a second round of it later in the afternoon.

I also got in a game of Taj Mahal with Avi, Amitai, Saarya, and Tal. I've always maintained that Havoc bears a strong resemblance to this game, and Tal and Adi both confirmed that as soon as we started playing. Tal played with the same strategy she uses to play (and win) Havoc, which is saving up for the last battles.

This doesn't work quite as well in Taj Mahal, since points are cumulative depending on what you earned in previous rounds. Nevertheless, she came in a reasonably close second to me. I did very well because I managed to arrange, from the fourth turn onwards, to have an entire hand with only one suit of cards for the entire game. The scores were actually pretty close until the end of round 9 or so, and then I pulled ahead, followed by Tal. Great game.

Later, I arranged for Tal, Adi, Amitai, and Saarya to play Modern Art, which Amitai won. Both Tal and Adi said that it reminded them of Masterpiece. They would have played Masterpiece, too, if it wasn't already too late.

Meanwhile, I played Puerto Rico with Rachel and Nadine. I swapped in a few buildings on low rotation. The building set was:

• Wildcat Strikers 1/1: At the beginning of any round, you can sacrifice this building and return the colonists on it to the supply in order to change one of the phases this round into Prospector instead of its usual function.
• Small Fashion District 2/1: Trade indigo at +2.
• Forest House 2/1: You may take a Forest during Settler. Pay 1 less per building if you have 1/3/5/7/... Forests. [This is slightly upped from the official version. The ability to block someone else's plantation pick is removed. And I never play with both this and Hacienda. Also, see Beachfront.]
• Small Warehouse
• Guest House
• Large Market
• Office
• Beachfront 6/3: You may take a Forest during Settler. You have a "wharf" with a capacity equal to the number of Forests that you own.
• Factory
• Large Business 8/3: Pay 1 less for any building. Earn 1 bonus VP if you ship anything during Captain (once per Captain, not once per shipment).
• Large General Workhouse 8/3 (2 circles): Each occupied location on LGW produces any type of good when matched with an occupied plantation of that type.
• Wharf
• Cathedral 10/4: +1 VP/3 red building VPs.
• Distillery 10/4: +2 VP/sugar plantation (max +8).
• Fortress
• Custom's House
• City Hall

After I described the new Forest House and Beachfront, Rachel jumped for it, even forgoing the standard Settler/Quarry opening to take a Forest House. Unfortunately, taking too many Forests can also severely hinder your resource production, which is what it did for Rachel, especially since Settler was only taken six times during the game.

The game was very strange, all along. Nobody produced coffee. Nadine had a monopoly on Tobacco. I took Factory and Wildcat Strikers. After using WS to prevent anyone from shipping one round, in order to ensure that I had a good position for the boats, I almost ended up buying it again, which can't happen during a normal game of PR.

I produced and shipped a lot of barrels. Both Rachel and Nadine build Large Businesses. Nadine ended with more shipping VP's because of that and the occasional locked Tobacco boat, but I had two big buildings to her one, and one of mine was Custom's House with a +8 bonus.

All in all, in addition to synagogue, nice meals, pleasant guests, and pleasant company, a nice way to spend the weekend.

Yehuda

P.S. A nice article by Larry Levy on the strange phenomenon of how some people think that thinking during a game is cheating.

P.P.S. And here's a whole forum for board games on Yahoo Answers that looks like it needs some new blood.

Anti-climactic Game Endings

This is what happens when you track too many blogs. Someone started a discussion about board games that peter out with anti-climactic endings, but I can't remember who. I search back a week in bloglines to no avail.

Anyhoo, I just wanted to add a confirmation of this phenomenon. Lately, even some excellent games seem to end with a dawning slow realization that the game is over slightly before it should be.

Examples:

Power Grid. It comes down to some positioning that happens a few rounds before the last. Even if you don't realize this until the last round, once the person with the most plant capacity has built an equivalent amount of cities, everyone else just tosses their cards in without finishing the round. Bleah.

Maharaja. Similar situation. Someone pulls ahead in palaces and then the last three rounds are useless attempts to catch up, since the leader probably has enough money already to drop the last palaces, and it is really difficult to stop this. Again, cards are figuratively tossed in at the beginning of the last round, rather than finishing out the round.

Taj Mahal. Another major offender in runaway leader, if the lead is far enough.

In extreme cases of Settlers of Catan this can also happen, but generally speaking with enough lucky dice and a trade embargo it always remains possible to catch up. In Puerto Rico, you may know that you've lost, but the two leading players almost never know who has won.

So what is wrong here? What is the pattern?

In Power Grid, it's that there is no hidden scoring. In Maharaja, not only is there no hidden scoring, the victory condition is just too easy to fulfill once you are leading. In Taj, it's that there are not enough points to earn each round, even with the hand points (a poor attempt to add hidden points to the game, in my opinion).

There's no pattern. It's just a slight negative feature of otherwise great games. You would think that they could have gone back to the drawing board and added something to fix this, but either it didn't matter enough to them to fix, or they didn't consider it a problem.

Whatever it is, now that it has been pointed out, it bothers me. Don't you hate when that happens?

Yehuda

Bat Mitzvah, Come and Gone

Well, all four of my children are now Bar or Bat Mitzvah'ed. Makes me old, although I still feel pretty young. I'm only 36.

Friday morning I took out a few moments to play Crossword Squares with Tal. A cute little pen and paper game, quick. Players alternate picking letters to fill their personal 5 x 5 grid with words. At the end of the game, players score 1, 2, and 4 points for 3, 4, and 5 letter words. Across and down only, overlaps ok, but not wholly contained words. (This is called Maven on BGG)

Shabbat afternoon, after the hard part was over, games were played in my house:

- I played Scrabble with Rachel, who quit after I got a bingo (Gastric) and a triple word, while she only had 4 R's in her hand.

- I introduced San Juan to a neighbor's child and my brother's child, both of whom have played Puerto Rico. I thought that the game was a foregone conclusion for one of them when he started off with Carpenter, Quarry, and Prefecture, but they reported a tie game, with the other player winning by hand count. Later, Saarya said they probably miscounted the points.

- I then introduced the above children and my brother to Taj Mahal. Fortunes waxed and waned, but eventually I pulled ahead. The last round was close, but I kept my lead by a few points. I played mostly commodities, and my main opponents had a mixture of both. My brother had an initial early lead, but overextended himself, and then complained as the game wound down and he was no longer in contention. Afterwards, he reflected that the game will take some learning to figure out. First game is a learning game, as I always say.

- Little children played cards, and Taki (Uno), and other such fluff.

We lent El Grande to the neighbors as their kid left, although none of them ever played it. I hope they managed to figure it out.

This week is both Yom Hazikaron - memorial day in Israel - and Yom Haazmaut - Independence day - so I don't think there will be an official game club evening. Maybe during the day sometime.

Yehuda