Session Report for Saturday, 08/19/2006

10 Players, 10 Games

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Clans

(Rolando, Dave, Marshall)

Clans is an older game designed by Leo Colovini (same designer as Cartegena I believe, which was alos played today). In clans there are 5 colored tribes scattered across the board and each player represents one color (their color is kept secret however). On their turn players may move any tribe or group of tribes (as long as it's less than 7) to any adjacent non empty space. A move can never be to an empty space and must always leave an empty space. In this way the board "shrinks" so to speak as the game goes on.

Once a tribe is completely isolated (all adjacent areas are empty) it can no longer be moved and must be scored. All colors present in the scored area receive a number of points equal to the total number of tribes in that area (if all 5 colors are present then singles are removed due to "strife").

And that's most of the game. There's a bit about epochs in which some terrain is more favorable than others and players achieving the isolation of a tribe get a VP chit but really, it's a pretty simple, abstract, yet engaging game.

In this game Blue (whoever that was) jumped out into a lead but then was really set back when a 10 tribe region was scored and blue was the only color removed due to strife. As the game went on Red and Green separated themselves from the other colors and sure enough, at the end of the game, they were both controled by players (yellow and black weren't controled by any player but still score points as regions are formed). Red turned out to be Rolando and I was green. the difference in the game came down to the VP chits of which I had more because I'd formed more regions. Blue turned out to be Dave who was doing well until that one disastrous region.

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Coloretto

(Rolando, Dave, Marshall)

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High Society

(Drew, Chris, Darren, Mark)

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Klunker

(Drew, Chris, Darren, Mark)

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Torres

(Chris, Drew, Marshall, Mark)

Torres is a fairly abstract action point game about building castles and getting your knights into the premium spaces in those castles to score points. The really clever way knights score points is by multiplying the level the knight is on by the total area of the castle. So if your knight is on the third level of a 10 square castle he would score 30 points.

I really like this scoring mechanisms as it forces tough choices between building up and building out, doing exclusively either is no good. There's more to it than that, there's a king that moves around for an additional scoring bonus and there are action cards that let you do clever things with your knights but the heart of the game is maximizing the scoring potential of each knight.

In this game Mark built a commanding castle with all 5 of his knights in it, he was set up to score huge but instead of increasing the area of the castle he build up, this allowed Drew to block in Mark's castle but building next to it. Meanwhile Chris and I worked together to build a castle that eventually was bigger than Mark's, so though I had fewer knights in it they scored more points and that was enough for me to win the game.

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Evo

(Chris, Drew, Marshall, Mark)

Next we each took control of our own heard of dinosaurs and tried to help them survive in a changing climate.

In this game you control the morphology of your dinosaurs by purchasing "mutations". Mutations allow things like moving your dinosaurs faster, increasing their tolerance for cold or heat, or increasing their ferocity. The trick is to keep as many dinosaurs alive as you can by either moving them to favorable climates or by enabling them to survive in unfavorable ones. Watch out for opposing dinosaurs who might want to force their way into your balmly climate! Survival of the fittest indeed!

Mutations are puchased with Victory points in an auction so you have to think real hard about what you want for your dino's and how much you're willing to spend for it. Special action cards which change the rules of the game spice things up.

In this game I went for movement (4 legs) and Mark went for combat (3 horns), in the end we were tied. The first tie-breaker is the number of dinos still alive on the board but we were tied in this too. The second tie breaker is to play a two player game so we just decided to share the victory.

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Roborally

(Kevin L., Karen, Rolando, Darren, Dave)

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Bang

(Kevin L., Karen, Darren, Dave, Chad)

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Cartegena

(Kevin L., Karen, Darren, Dave, Chad)

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Hansa

(Drew, Chris, Marshall, Mark)

Next we played the Michael Schact game Hansa. Hansa is all about buying and selling goods in the Hansiatic league http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_league

The twist to this game is there is only one cargo ship and it is controled by each player in turn. So wherever player A leaves the ship is where player B begins his turn. Players get a certain number of actions which they can spend moving the ship to various cities. At each city they may choose to do only one thing: Buy goods, sell goods, or establish markets.

The game has a tension between spending time establishing markets (which is necessary but doesn't score many points) and selling goods (which scores big points but requires markets). There is also the goal of having the majority of markets in a city so that other players must pay you to purchase goods from that city.

In this game I used my experience to fling my markets out wide fairly early on then spent the rest of the game selling goods for the victory. I really like games that sometimes force you to help other players in order to help yourself so Hansa is a favorite of mine.

-- MarshallPhilips - 21 Aug 2006
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