Gaming at My Bros / Game News

Spent the first day of Sukkot at my brothers. When I wasn't creating stories to tell my niece, eating, sleeping, or davening, I was gaming.


Magic

Wed evening we played Magic: the Gathering, which I hadn't played in some time. We drew random cards, built decks, and battled for 2 out of 3 games. I built Black/White, splashing red for a Fireball, and heavy on the creatures. Ben built Black/Blue. Both of us had a lot of fliers.

The first game I drew rather poorly and lost. A late Pox evened the score a bit, but wasn't enough to save me. In the second game, we both had light land pulls, but I played the swampwalker I had swapped in from the sideboard. The third game was very close. Twice during the game, a series of spells or attacks cleared the entire creature space leaving us both with nothing but land out. It cam down to the wire, with me at the advantage, but Ben somehow managed to find a way to get through the last point to kill me right before I could kill him.

Some people complain about Magic because of the collectible aspect of the game or because in order to compete at fancy tournaments you have to buy the latest cards. What a bunch of bollocks. Ben and I had one of the finest gaming experiences ever Wed night with nothing but pulling random cards from his antiquated collection.

A couple of thousand Magic cards costs tens of dollars and provides an incredible, portable game play (both during the game and outside the game) and a replay value far and above just about any board or computer game.

Winner's Circle

I brought a few games with me that I thought my 7 year old niece could enjoy, and Winner's Circle, Knizia's horse racing board game, one of them. It manages to take a simple dice driven horse racing and betting game and turn it into something light and fun, with a nice balance of luck and thought, and decent player interaction. It's too light for my game group, though.

I didn't think Ben would like it, because dice don't tend to like him. Given that warning, however, he found it tolerable, especially since my niece enjoyed it enough to want to play a second time. Tal also joined in the second game, while I went to read.

The game I played was close, but I managed a close win.

The Menorah Game

I brought a copy of It's Alive to show them, but Tal prefers to play with the original theme and graphics, as does my niece. They played a few games. The only shame about the newer nicely published version is that the graphics are less appropriate for younger players. It's a favorite game of kids I know ages 7 and up.

Amun-Re

Unlike my game group, Ben made the mistake of letting his religious gaming buddies read the unadulterated rules to Amun Re before playing it, and since then they won't try it. Religious problems with the theme. I solved that in my group by tweaking the theme somewhat.

Saarya agreed to play with Ben and me. I started with strong pyramids to their strong farmers, which is generally a disastrous way to start. I fully expected to lose, especially when Ben tied me at the end of the first era. Now I didn't even have a token lead to build on, and far less money than either of them, too.

My building certainly fell behind in the second era, but I managed to secure the provinces I needed to fulfill two bonus cards in my hand. One of the provinces I needed wasn't a problem, as it was the least desirable of those on offer; the others I got by the skin of my teeth.

Saarya ended up deciding the game by choosing which side of the river he wanted to secure best pyramids. He took the side in which he was competing with Ben, leaving me to gain the bonus on the other side. That was just enough to let me win by 3 points over both of them.

Surprised the heck out of me.

And by the way, this was the first time I noticed that in the second era you only choose among provinces that were also available during the first era. I had always simply drawn new provinces from all possible cards in the second era. I'm not entirely sure which is the better mechanic.

Game News

Mainstream media always compares new board games to Monopoly, even when the comparison is not exactly warranted. In this case, the Islamic game Heaven's Gate is called the Islamic version of Monopoly, even though it's clearly a trivia game, not a real estate game. And there are no dice.

It differs from Monopoly in that the players do not roll a die but instead pick the card on the box they arrive in. On these cards there are questions to answer such as "Who is an unbeliever?" or "Name the four sects." Those who gain 2,000 points at the end of the game earn the right to go to the Heaven.

Speaking of Monopoly, the usual crowing and complaining is going on in response to the final release of the UK's new Monopoly version, in which only some cities managed to get on the board at all, but the ones in the cheapest spaces are complaining anyway. Your fault for not cheating and hacking the contest like the other cities did, so shut up.

Scotland Yard, the old game of chasing Mr X around London, is going live via mobile devices, Ravesburger, and T-Mobile.

Cranium WOW is looking to set the world record for number of simultaneous players this Saturday night.

Another card game shooting. People, if you can't manage to avoid being violent during the game, don't be violent in the same location in which you're storing drugs and stolen police equipment. And if you can manage to avoid being violent during the game, maybe blabbing during a card game about a murder you committed at some other time is also not such a bright idea.

Yehuda

Two Player Winner's Circle

I admit that I was skeptical of playing this two player; too much information. It played ok, but I was right.

With two players, there needs to be more hidden information, without it being informationless. There is just not enough going on. On the one hand, you have slightly more control over how the horses move. On the other hand, who cares how the horses move if you're both bidding on the same horses?

I suggest that 3 of the chips get placed on the board, and one chip you secretly write down on which horse it is bet. That will add enough uncertainty to make for a slightly more challenging game. And/or perhaps use chips valued 0,1,2,3 instead of 0,1,1,2. Or any valued chips, so long as the number of bids you place adds up to 5.

As it is, Tal won the first round. Our bets were exactly identical in the second round, aside from our 0 bids which don't count. And she won the third round by a slight edge, even though I managed to dump the horse with her lone bid into last place before the game ended.

Yehuda

Gobi has designed an interesting abstract dice movement game.

Pictures of Sewage Backing Up Into Our Kitchen

You sickos. I'm not going to show you pictures of that. Maybe I'll hook up a smell-o-meter.

Suffice to say: it's not pleasant. It's not just the brownish water on the floor and the inability to use any of our water fixtures, it's also anything on the floor that can get ruined by being in prolonged contact with water. And we can't get any plumbers until tomorrow.

We had 18 for Friday night dinner, and I made three types of chicken two types of rice, meatballs, various side dishes, three flavors of iced tea. They brought the desserts. And your lives are all just a little incomplete not having tasted my incredible sweet and sour chicken.

Games:

In the afternoon, I went to the same neighbors, because they were all home, and they had wanted to play the evening before but dinner ended too late. We played Winner's Circle and Tigris and Euphrates.

Winner's Circle was well received, although it seemed to prove too difficult for the 81 year old grandfather to grasp (I could be wrong).

Tigris and Euphrates was also well received. Unless someone has had incredible early luck and is already essentially unbeatable, I never have a bad game of Tigris and Euphrates. And not only is it always fun, it is always interesting. You just sometimes have to avail yourself of the "throw out tiles and pick back up to 6" action once in a while. I ended up losing 14 to 7 to 3. I had 7. And I thought that I had been doing well.

Next to us, the 15 year old boy was playing with his friend a card game that involved flipping over cards and being the first one to slap the table on some condition.

Yehuda

Also: The Texarcana Gazette misquotes Rick Thornquist in a mainstream article talking about board games. I say "misquotes" only because I'm sure that Rick didn't say, "10 years ago, Germany created an award for best board game."

More on the Topic of Luck

After playing Winner's Circle, I admit that my basic conceptions about luck vs randomness are overly simplistic.

My current definitions are:

- Randomness: something random happens.
- Luck: your fate is determined without any control on your part.

When randomness happens before players take their actions, there is generally little or no luck as a result. When randomness happens after players take their actions, it is all luck. Of course, better strategic or tactical play before the random event occurs can swing the odds of the forthcoming event in your favor by a great margin. Nevertheless, once the actions are finished and the die rolls begin, it is senseless to lose because you rolled a 1 on a d100, just as it is senseless to win if you rolled 2-100.

I'm gradually coming to believe that there is something in between these two extremes.

I don't mean that "luck will always even out over time," if you play a thousand games or so, for instance. I don't have the patience to wait 1000 games for it to even out. Losing the first three games due to poor luck is enough to discourage me from continuing, even if this is not anomalous.

I also don't mean to consider a multitude of dice rolls as any different from a single die roll. Ten red dice versus three white dice is reducible to one die roll, however much you may lose the "excitement" and "theme" by doing so.

In Winner's Circle, there are seven horses that can be moved at the start of each turn. Each horse moves 4 different space amounts, depending on the results of the die. E.g. one horse will move 7 spaces on a 1-3, 2 spaces on a 4, 6 spaces on a 5, and 5 spaces on a 6, while another horse will move 2 spaces on a 1-3, 15 spaces on a 4, 1 space on a 5, and 5 spaces on a 6.

After you move a horse, it cannot be moved again until all horses have been moved this turn. At the beginning of the next turn, all horses are flipped back up and the next player to roll has a choice of all seven horses again.

Is this simply a luck game? After all, the results of the dice determine who will win quite often. Or is this a randomness game, where after the dice are rolled, the player's choose how to react to the rolls? Or something in between?

A purely strategic game would go as follows: the dice are rolled fifty times, and the results marked in order. Each player then chooses to bet on the horses. Then, the players begin to resolve the horses' movements one by one. Lots of randomness, no luck. Still challenging, because each player can choose horses in unexpected ways.

A purely lucky game would go as follows: the players choose which horses will be moved in which order, constantly rotating. Then the dice are rolled, applying to each horse in order. You can still mitigate your chances by calculating which horses are more likely to win, and which will pay off more. But after you are done, the dice take over.

So what is this space in the middle? At the end of the turn, when you have only one horse to move, the die roll is simply luck. At the beginning of the turn, after rolling the die, you have seven options from which to choose. You can choose to advance your own horse if the die is a good result for that horse. Or, you could choose to advance another horse that you don't want to see win if the die is a bad result for that horse, thus preventing another player from moving it more spaces later in the turn.

These choices only exist if the die result is not already the favorable one for your opponent's horse. In this situation, bad luck gives you no choice, and good luck gives you a choice; or good luck gives you the one result you need to move your horse a great distance before someone else can move it less. So there is certainly luck, enough to ruin the game if you run into a bad string of it. Hopefully, the possibility of this string of bad luck is low enough that it won't happen very often. If bad luck doesn't reign, then you are left with the usual strategy as a result of randomness.

This quasi-middle ground can make a light game still a tactical game without luck dominating overly much. In the case of Winner's Circle, my opinion is that it falls a bit over the wrong side of the line. As the number of horses you can move gets reduced, you're just rolling dice to see who wins, which is not that exciting for me. Still, enough of the game is interesting to warrant some replay. Of course, if you feel differently about this sort of luck in games, you will like it more.

Yehuda

Weekend Gaming

Our new acquisition Winner's Circle is a big hit with my daughter Tal, so she was up for a few games of this. We only managed to get in one together, and then she dragged the game to her friend's house to play.

Summation: This game is a good intro game, with a nice mix of control and luck. The mechanics are a little repetitive, however.

We played with Tal's friend in the evening, but didn't have time to finish, so we picked it up again the next day. I won after the last race with a third place victory for a horse that only I was betting on. I quickly learned that most of your movement choices should involve moving other people's horse, rather than your own.

Tal and I also played Oh Hell. She led until round seven, while I was getting crappy hand after crappy hand. Finally I got a good hand and took her down two tricks, winning in the end.

Later in the afternoon Rachel, Nadine, and I played two games of Puerto Rico. Fewer changes to the buildings than usual: Assembly Line instead of Small Market (a must), you can move a colonist onto Hospice immediately after buying it, Discretionary Hold instead of Large Warehouse, and Library instead of University. We played with Harbor, unlike usual.

Nadine was due to start with corn, and she ended up winning. I was fairly convinced that Library would be too strong in a three player game, so I bought it at first opportunity - round five, I think. I used it furiously, taking colonists when I couldn't take doubloons. Rachel had six corns, but her shipping was kept to a minimum. Nadine managed to lock a coffee boat and also collect income. Both Rachel and Nadine had Discretionary Hold, which is sub-optimal for both of them.

In the second game, I abandoned the Library idea and instead opted for Hospice, my own coffee monopoly, and after some painful consideration, Large Market. Rachel was again shipping furiously, but this time I picked up a Harbor, and then three large buildings, while she didn't get any. She shipped 44 VPs, but I shipped 22, and my building VP count was much higher. Nadine came in second. It was valiantly fought.

Coffee monopoly won twice in a row. A strong strategy.

Yehuda