News in Reviews / Old Puzzler Continuation / New Fortnightly Puzzler

A Settlers Expansion Night

(or A Decidedly Uneven Settlers Experience)

While studying for the bar exam, a friend of mine stumbled upon the on-line Settlers of Catan expansions, the Jungle and the Volcano. He had decided to go Settlers-free during the studying and subsequent bar, but clearly it was on his mind. This discovery stuck with him throughout his studying and into his test days. When he finally finished the last day of testing yesterday, all he could think about was playing with the two expansions as a way of celebrating. So we did.

The Jungle and Volcano are meant to cover up the otherwise useless Desert. Just like the other tiles, you put a non-6/8/2/12 number on these expansion tiles. If you build alongside them, you get their benefit when the number hits.

With the Jungle, you receive a Discovery Token per Settlement (or two per City) which can only be used for the purchase of a Development Card. That is, the Discovery Token can substitute for the ore, wheat, or sheep when buying a DC. There are no drawbacks.

With the Volcano, any Settlement or City built alongside the volcano has a chance of being destroyed. Each of the corners of the Volcano hex has a number, 1 through 6. Whenever the Volcano's number is rolled, it erupts, and an additional die is rolled. When this third die matches one of the numbers on the Volcano, the Volcano destroys whatever is built there. A City is reduced to a Settlement, and a Settlement is taken off the board. The Robber does not prevent the Volcano from activating. An additional rule that we played with is the Gold Production. Before the Volcano erupts, you may take a resource of your choice for your Settlement (or any two if you have a City).

In a normal 3 to 4 player game, we would've been able to more accurately determine the worth of these expansion tiles. As it happened, we had six players and played a 6 player game with two deserts. With a what-the-heck philosophy, we played with both the Jungle and the Volcano.

As it turns out, we messed up our initial placement. While no one played next to the Jungle, two players (me included) played right next to the Volcano. Only my law school friend had read the instructions and rules, and he neglected to tell us that we can play against the Jungle but not against the Volcano with our initial two Settlements. Oops. What happened next is probably due in large part to this botch-up.

The players decided on random numbers for the Jungle and Volcano. The Jungle ended up with an 11 and the Volcano ended up with a 5. You probably know where this is going.

Another player and I both played on the Volcano. No one played on the Forest. The rest of the development was pretty standard. The red numbers got played on, and we were pretty spread out. No one played on the ports, but several of us were very close, which became a factor.

In the first few turns, the Volcano hit. We rolled the die. Neither player was affected, so we got the resource card of our choice. (It should be noted that a Volcano would have destroyed me at this stage in the game. My heartbeat actually increased!) In the next five turns or so, another Volcano hit. We rolled the die and again were unaffected. The Volcano didn't hit for the remainder of the game, but the damage had been done.

I was able to build exactly what I needed in the beginning of the game (a couple of more Settlements and a City), and all of it relatively quickly. I jumped to 5 points before a few other players even got 3. Then all weirdness broke out.

All Settlers players have had games where one number hits far more than any others. Usually multiple people benefit from this. Not this time.

I had a Settlement and a City alongside an 8 Ore. I also had a City on an 8 Wheat. I think two other players were touching 8s on the board, but their production was minimal. At this early set-up in the game, 8 started hitting a lot. Every time it came to me, I was upgrading to a City. All of a sudden I had two Cities next to a 10 Wheat, and 10 started breaking up the 8 rolls. 7s were nowhere to be found.

On my last turn, I had 20 cards in my hand, most of them wheat, on a wheat port. I had two Ores and four Bricks. I built the rest of the way to 10 points with cards left over. My closest competitor had 4 points. Some still had 2. The entire game took 40 minutes.

This game is void because of our rules violation, but the violation illustrates the power of the Volcano. It hit twice, but that was enough. The other players seemed to think that the major point was how many times the 8s and 10s hit, but that was secondary to getting precisely what you needed early in the game. When you don't have to trade with other players to get what you need that early in the game, there's going to be a big development disparity.

As per the Jungle, one player built alongside it and an 11 never rolled. We didn't get to see the benefits of it.

Both the Jungle and Volcano rules allow for the players to decide on a number and put it on, and I think this is fair. Personally, I would vote for a lower number on the Volcano and a higher number on the Jungle. The Jungle seems inherently weak, and the Volcano seems amazingly strong. The negative side-effect of the Volcano seems small in comparison to the possible positive results which if they occur early enough result in a sort of positive snowball effect.

I think we probably needed either two Jungles or two Volcanos for the game to be totally equal. This game started off unequal, and that coupled with a rules violation and crazy dice rolling made for a strange, bizarre, and completely unsatisfying game. I'd still try them out again, but I'm hesitant to believe that they won't throw the game out of whack.

***********************************************************************
***********************************************************************
***********************************************************************
***********************************************************************
***********************************************************************

New Fortnightly Puzzler

I'm thinking of a famous chess master whose three-letter name is also the initials for a famous radio program and a kid's boardgame, if you were to abbreviate either. Can you list all three in full?*


* Please refrain from posting Puzzler Answers. If you've figured it out, email me at smattathias@gmail.com and I'll post the first correct solver's name. Thanks!

***********************************************************************

Old Puzzler Q & A

In an unfortunate two-week period, I had a couple of odd things happen: 1) our landlady who also provides wireless internet service to us started remodeling her home, thus killing our internet connection, and 2) our friend (mentioned above) needed our computer for three days to take his bar exam. For the majority of this two-week period, we had little internet service at home and that made this 20Q puzzler quite difficult.

Thank you to everyone who contributed. We got up to 12 questions. The questions and answers are on the comments of the following link:

http://boredgamegeeks.blogspot.com/2007/07/old-puzzler-answer-news-in-reviews-new.html

I'll let this one go another two weeks. With just eight questions left and a ton of info, you guys should knock this one out without much difficulty. Additional questions can be posted here. Good luck!

A couple of new ones...

Well, not much to say this week, I've got vacation hanging over my head so am rushing around to put that together.

I'll be seeing some nieces and nephews, they're all still fairly young so I think I'll just bring along Igloo Pop and No Thanks! as they can fit quite a range of players as well as a decent range of numbers of players.

I've manage to game quite a bit in the past two weeks, just a little above normal and that is mostly due to my recent aquisition of Age of Empires III: The Age of Discovery by Tropical Games. That is a long name, but the game deserves it. As I'm sure other people might have mentioned elsewhere, there aren't a lot of new mechanics to be seen here, but they are all well-oiled and work together to make a very nice game. My favorite style of game, in fact. Lots of agonizing choices where there are several good things you want to do but not enough resources to pull them all off. It seems like a fairly quick game but does tend to pull in at around two hours, and not the one hour I keep thinking it takes... To top it off, the game has a nice snowball (or engine building or "garden-tending") style to it so everyone's strategies tend to pay off in greater and greater amounts as the game goes on... I've played it 3 or 4 times in the past week and will be playing it some more in the future, I'm sure.

The other game I've been playing is the Stonehenge game anthology put out by Titanic Games. This is a set of pieces for five players consisting of a deck of cards, a circular track on a playing board, some round colored tokens, and some colored bar-shaped tokens. Then five "big-name" designers all developed a game for this set of pieces. Purchasers are, of course, also encouraged to try to design their own games - something I'm glad to see encouraged as I think it will help foster some nice creativity in younger minds and possibly swell the ranks of game designers in general. (More games for me to play, possibly.) In any case, I enjoyed most of the games I tried in Stonehenge. They all tended to take about 45 minutes to an hour to play and had a nice amount of gameplay contained in that short period of time. I wouldn't have wanted the games to go much longer as they weren't as deep as most games that aren't "anthologies", but for 60 minutes they were a very nice treat. In fact, in one evening I played five games of Stonehenge. Two games each of the first and third game in the instruction manual (each game takes up 2 pages of instructions so they aren't that complex) and then one game of the set.

We (the four, then five of us) all liked the first game a sort of area control game, and enjoyed the third - based around bidding for stones to collect sets of like colors. The last game we played, was supposed to be a wargame but was more like another area control. It was interesting but I think it was limited by the small deck size. I think that struck the heart of the limiting factor of this sort of anthology. Since all the parts are set out ahead of time, you can't customize things to "fix" problems as they arise. I wonder if the wargame would play better if it had just a bit more time to develop - thus needing slightly more cards. Then again, I guess our group could tinker with it ourselves, that's what the anthology is trying to promote in the first place.

Bottom line: I've got to finish vacation preparations so that's all for today. But if you're looking for a "bottom line" on the Stonehenge anthology, I give it a pretty big thumbs up. There are at least 2 if not 3 quality games there that can be played in a medium-short period of time and be quite enjoyable (strategic/not just a time waster). That is a somewhat rare category and with a couple varieties of game to choose from in one box, that's a pretty good deal.

Cities, Curses, and Churches

Last weekend I had the chance to participate at a friend’s “Game-a-thon”, a day of open gaming at his house where folks drop in when they can. I was able to stay for a few hours and had my choice of playing in a game of Shogun (the new version of Wallenstein) or playing several shorter games. I chose to play some shorter games, as I thought I would have more fun, and it would give me an opportunity to play with some folks I don’t get to play with as often.

First up was Saint Petersburg (Rio Grande Games). I enjoy this game immensely, although have been a tad burned out on it as I get to play it against the computer frequently using the freeware computer program (check out the WestPark Gamers web site to download it). The computer AI is not too bad, and I only win four player games about 1/3 of the time. I got lucky in the first Noble round, picking up the 18-cost noble that provided a steady income of 6 rubles and 3 victory points from then on out. Things continued to fall into place for me and I outpaced the rest of the group by about 20 or so points. The game ended very quickly with all the blue buildings coming out before people had very many nobles. I took advantage of the observatory to pick up a couple of extra nobles during the blue building rounds, and made sure to hold a noble upgrade or two in my hand even though I knew I wouldn’t be able to put them down until late in the game. All in all, I think my computer playing experience served me well, although I will also admit that I had some nice opportunities fall in my lap. If you haven’t played the game, I highly recommend it. It contains a strong “build-up” element requiring players to initially focus on income and then transition to victory points later in the game. At the same time it also offers a few distinct ways of obtaining victory points (focusing on buildings or nobles or a mixture of both). All this is combined in a quick-playing (roughly an hour) game that is simple to explain to new players (takes about 10minutes or less to get up and playing.) I highly recommend St. Petersburg to help casual boardgamers make the leap into the build-up or “snowball” style of boardgames.

The second game we played is a new one by Asmodee, Wicked Witches Way. It is a very lightweight game where players are all witches and are trying to win a race. The first player to finish the race earns a few bonus points while all the other witches gain points proportional to how close they are to the finish. However, winning the race is only part of the points, players can gain special cards that give bonus points at the end of the game (for having performed acrobatics during the race.) The game revolves around rolling a set of 9 dice in a cool little book-shaped box. Players examine the dice rolled which display various orange or black symbols. When a player is ready, they shut the box and then lay down their spell cards. Players have spell cards that match the symbols on the dice. The object is to play either one or more symbols that match the orange symbols showing on the dice or one or more symbols that match the black symbols on the dice. If a symbol appears as both an orange and a black, it should not be played. Once the book is shut (hiding the dice), players can take their time playing their cards. The book is then opened and players check their spell cards. Players move their witches forward one space for each correct symbol they match. If they make a mistake (by playing symbols that appeared as both orange and black, or a symbol that didn’t appear at all) then they don’t get to move. The player who closed the book gets to score their turn first, but if they make a mistake, they go back 2 spaces. To add some spice into the game, if a player manages to play ALL the correct orange or ALL the correct black dice, it is a “perfect spell” and a bonus is earned (as long as you are not the first-place witch). Matching all the orange dice gets you bonus 2 spaces on the track, and matching all the black dice lets you draw a special card for each die matched. These special cards give players one-time abilities such as replacing a card just before scoring them, earning additional time to reopen the book before having to lay down cards. These cards also contain the acrobatics bonus point cards, which earn a player points at the end of the game. As mentioned, the witch in first place does not get the bonus. At the end of each round, the witch(es) leading the race have a curse token placed next to them. They are then ineligible to earn any bonuses for matching all the orange or black dice. This is a handy little “hold back the leader” aspect of the game, but it is so strong that trying to always be in second place is often an important strategy.

Even though it was my first play of the game (we were all trying it for the first time), I managed to get out front and stay out front for most of the race. Unfortunately, that meant I earned very few of the perfect spell bonuses – especially the cool spell card ones for black dice. The race was a tight one with three of the four of us crossing the finish line in the last turn. Surprisingly, the only player to NOT finish the race had a stack of nice bonus point cards and won the game, presumably having performed very cool acrobatics on his broomstick along the way. Despite my loss, I enjoyed the game immensely and we clearly laughed much more at this game than any other played that day. It is a fun, lighthearted game fun for those who like games with quick-pattern matching and a tad bit of memorization. There is even room for a bit of strategy (like trying to mess with other player’s plans by closing the book early, etc…) I didn’t like the pick-on-the-leader aspect of the curse token. I felt it was too strong a penalty, but it was probably my own fault for remaining in the lead for so long… I fear it might lead to extreme “game-y” style of play where players purposely lose points in order to try to stay behind the leader and pick up extra black cards…

My third and final game (while the other players were still on their first game of Shogun…) was Pillars of the Earth (Mayfair Games). I had not played it before but had heard good things (as well as bad). I won’t describe the game in detail here, but I managed to take second place in my first play of the game (two of the other three players had played before). I would have taken first place, but the last turn I drew the “give all players one metal cube” event card and the first place player still had a need for another metal cube while I already had all I wanted. I made a mistake or two early in the game in buying too many masons early, but eventually did OK with purchases and pawn placement. We all started out very gold heavy and then three of us quickly ran low, while the fourth player had plenty of gold to spend, but never got a pawn drawn in the early rounds of bag-drawing. I have heard people complain about the vagrancies of the bag-drawing, but I think the whole idea of gold hoarding is designed to counter just sort a situation. If you save up some gold you can then pay when your pawn is drawn early to get some good things and/or craftsmen. If you have gold but aren’t drawn in the early pawn draws, then you can afford to spend gold to purchase one of the craftsmen available in the worker assignment phase. Sure, you may need to maneuver to go first in a round to get a chance at buying a craftsman, but that shouldn’t be too hard to recognize in advance in the mid-game. All in all, I felt the pawn-drawing mechanism was fairly balanced and didn’t need too many more tweaks. I felt the pawn-drawing pain in the last round, holding a “free pawn placement” card but not getting drawn until late in the round. However, it didn’t set me back much, as I mentioned before. I’m looking forward to trying this game again some day to work on further evaluations.

All in all, I had a good day of gaming, 3 games in about 4 hours. Meanwhile, my other friends managed to finish their game of Shogun in just under 4 hours. While I’d love to try a game of Shogun some time, I think I made the right choice.

Taking it like a Viking

I got a chance to play Fire and Axe (by Asmodee) the other day and had a good time. Now, I’m not one to eschew a luck factor in my shorter-length games, but I had heard that this one might have a bit too much luck for some folks’ taste. Some have gone as far as suggesting a few house rules to help mitigate poor rolls. In particular, when trying to raid a village a die is rolled up to 3 times in succession in order to loot the village or town. Rolling pooly and losing three crewmembers by failing all three rolls can be a frustrating situation, especially if the probability of success was high. One suggestion to correct this is to add a +1 for each successive roll. Since it was my first game, I wasn’t ready to adjust the rules quite so much, but thought perhaps the last roll (of 3) could get a +1 just as a thank-you-for-playing parting gift…

We got into the game and started playing and one of my opponent’s proceeded to begin failing a raid. After two missed rolls, I pointed out the house rule that I thought might help his situation (adding +1 to the last roll). He quickly pointed out that this is a game about Vikings and no stinking Viking worth his pelts would be caught dead with a wimpy sort of rule like that. He was going to “take it like a Viking” and didn’t need any special accommodations. He rolled (and failed if you’re curious – adding +1 wouldn’t have helped anyway) and that was the end of that possible house rule.

The game proceeded on and good and bad luck was had by all. While some people had things roll their way more than others, I decided this was by no means a luck-fest. There was plenty of room in the game for solid strategy and planning. Once it has been played through a few times and people get to know the cards, there might even be occasions for lying low and waiting for particular things to show up. I may be slightly clouded in my judgment, since I ended up winning, but I felt the game was quite fun. I did have my fair share of poor die rolls near the beginning, but had fewer near the end when it was perhaps more important. Rolls I missed early and thought were crucial weren’t as important as ones I rolled well on near the end of the game. This also helped me as I was a smaller threat at the start of the game and was able to catch up rather than trying to continue to fight for the lead.

The game took over two hours to play with four players but should go under two now that we all know the rules. While a tad long, that is an acceptable length for a game that has one’s fortunes tied to the vagaries of dice. Now that I have had a chance to reflect on the game, I have to acknowledge that I don’t mind the luck-factor at all, even without the house rules. One reason is the theme of the game. Sea voyages and plundering villages are risky propositions (as is creating new settlements or trading – all actions that can be performed within the game). Vikings were no strangers to risk, and if I’m going to play a game about Vikings, I don’t mind taking a few chances myself.