Session Report for Friday, 3/2/2007

14 gamers 16 games

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Liar's Dice

(Joanne, Jenna) (Joanne, Jenna, Marshall)

When I first arrived Joanne and Jenna were playing Liar's Dice (actually Pirate's Dice, which is a theme licensed from the movie Pirates of the Caribbean.)

Liar's Dice is a bluffing game where each player secretly roles 5 dice and examines the results. The active player then "bids" by saying how many of a certain number of dice he thinks are present between all players. For example he might say "three twos" meaning he thinks there are three dice showing two pips between all of the players. The next player either has to up the bid by incrementing the number of dice or the number of pips or call "liar". If he calls liar then all the die are revealed and the results are examined. If the bid is met then the player calling liar loses a die, if the bid is not met then the bidding player loses a die. Play then continues. until only one person has any dice left, that person wins. That's all there is too it yet it's surprisingly fun and tense.

Pirate's dice presents two rules changes over the Liar's Dice version I'm familiar with, one good and one not so good.

The good: Pirate's dice replaces the 1-die with a wild card character. This significantly helps game play because it increases the possible number of any given bid. This helps towards the endgame when there are fewer dice in play and a bid of anything over 1 would normally be impossible to make. With wild cards in play higher bids are viable throughout the whole game and this is a good thing.

The bad: Pirate's dice introduces the rule that you can never decrease the number of pips portion of the bid. In normal Liar's Dice the bid for quantity of dice can never decrease and it must increase if the pip bid decreases. This provides a ratchet mechanism that ensures the bids will only get more extreme and eventually will the bluff will be called. Pirates Dice increases the strength of the ratchet by saying even the pip bid can never decrease. This isn't really necessary though, and it constrains the players options. If you role a bunch of 2s and the opening bid is four sixes then you're screwed in Pirates Dice. Whereas, in Liar's Dice you could bid five twos. Without the option of lowering the pip bid players often can't make the best out of the hand they rolled. It removes some of the creative bidding from the game.

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Incan gold

(Marshall, Kevin, Joanne, Jenna, Paul, Chris, August, Stephanie)

I think we finally played Incan Gold correctly by revealing our actions before dealing the next card. There's really not much to this game but it handles up to 8 players so smoothly and plays so quickly that it's a pretty good filler before the real games start.

In this game I hung in too long during each round going for the big score and ended up with only 3 points. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

Now that just about everybody has played this game once I think I'll start putting the artifact cards into the game. That might spice things up a bit.

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Settlers of Catan

(Marshall, Joanne, Jenna, Kevin)

Next up we pulled out the granddaddy of euro games - Settlers. The set up for this game was very wood deprived. The four wood hexes were on 3, 3, 11, 11 respectively so you can see not much wood was coming up.

All in all this was a pretty close game of Setters between all four players which is good because often in Settlers one player can get really hosed and fall behind irrecovably. Usually, in order to win, it's necessary to have either the Longest Road or the Largest Army. Well, Jenna got the Longest Road and Joanne got the Largest Army but I was able to squeeze out the win because I got 2 +1 VP cards from the development deck and I was able to upgrade four settlements into cities. Joanne and Jenna each had 9 points and probably would have been able to get ten on their next turns.

Still a classic game worthy of a play now and then. (boy did I ever hate the Cities and Knights expansion though, don't get me started on that.)

The following is a picture that I uploaded to BGG of my sister (right) playing Settlers with some friends when she was visiting Austria. Note that they took out some hexes for a three person game.

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Power Grid: Central Europe

(Chris, Paul, August, Clint, Gregory)

Power Grid: Central Europe has a few rule changes due to Austria and Poland restrictions towards Nuclear Power Plants and Wien, located in Austria, acceptance of garabage. A player builting in Austria and/or Poland can not bid on or even pick a nuclear power plants. In this game, we did not build in Austria, which took out one of the restricted countries. In the initial building turn everyone except Chris did not build in Poland. In the later turns the games played like normal Power Grid. I made same bad decisions in the beginning of the game by bidding on some powerful, high numbered, power plants. This hurt me in the long run by restricting me from building in to the cities to make electros. Chris ended up winning. Clint, Gregory, and Paul did not do too bad for first-timers. Paul tried the resource-less strategy by buying only wind powered plants (except for the first power plant).

-- AugustRatzlaff - 11 Mar 2007

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Cartagena

(Kevin, Marshall, Joanne, Jenna, Robert)

What is it with thinly themed pirate games this session? Anyway, Cartagena is the game where you're trying to get your six pirates out of the dungeon and into the boat. You move forward by playing cards and you acquire cards by moving backwards. I think Kevin has some strategy figured out for this game because he always seems to do really well. He won this game rather handily. I'll have to play closer attention next time.

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Last time I played this, I bombed at it, so I still haven't figured this game out yet. Most of the time, I've been trying to take an opportunistic approach:

-- I try to keep as many cards in my hand as I can to increase my chances of taking advantage of other players' pirates and leaping over them (kind of like Power Grid -- hang back then jump over the leaders when the time is right)

-- I keep all my pirates moving, and don't let any lag too far behind. Stragglers have fewer opportunities to jump over pirates, and fewer options for moving backwards.

-- Likewise, I try to keep my guys bunched up so that there are fewer groups of pirates that other players can use to jump over.

-- KevinLi - 05 Mar 2007

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Imperial

(Marshall, Kevin, Robert)

Imperial is a euro/wargame hybrid set in Europe around the period of WW1. The twist in Imperial is that players don't represent individual countries instead they represent investors who are loaning money to the great powers by buying bonds in those countries. As such, players don't get turns, countries do, and the player who has loaned the most money to a country decides what that country does on its turn. Thus, control of countries can and does change as the game progresses and players buy bonds. There are six countries in the game: Austria-Hungary, Italy, France, Great Britain, Germany, and Russia.

On a countries turn the actions available to that country are controlled by the "rondel". The roundel is a mechanism that lists all the allowed actions in a circle. On a countries turn it may move forward up to three spaces on the rondel taking whatever action it lands on. This is a neat way to keep the actions paced and make them occur in a logical order. The possible actions are: import units, maneuver, produce units, build factory, tax, invest. Some actions are represented twice on the rondel.

In this game Kevin started out with control of Austia-Hungary and Great Britain, Robert started with France and Germany, and I started with Italy and Russia. Kevin opened very aggressively with A-H expanding to take control of all of the balkans. Eventually, however, I was able to use Italy and Russia to attack on two fronts and wrest control from him. Kevin was much more timid in his opening with Britain and Robert was able to effectively blockade him with France and Germany.

At one point I controlled France for a little bit in order to break up its effective teamwork with Germany while Robert took control of A-H but it was too late to save that country. Kevin retaliated by taking control of Germany but once again it was towards the end of the game and a bit too late. The game ended when Italy reached the 25 point threshold and we each calculated the value of our bonds and added in our cash to get our final score. I was able to pull out the win mainly because I controlled France and Russia uninterrupted throughout the game and they were effectively able to work together to crush A-H and prevent a second front from opening for either country.

Rules we played wrong.

In a game of this complexity it's not unusual to get some rules wrong and we did.

1) A minor rule mistake is that fleets move before armies. Therefore, you can move a fleet then convoy but NOT convoy then move a fleet. I don't remember specifically when this happened but I'm pretty sure we made this mistake somewhere in the game.

2) A much bigger mistake is the reward for increasing the tax income of a country. I thought that as long as a countries tax income went up the player was awarded with $1 million. But it's actually $1 million PER LEVEL OF INCREASE, which is much more money. At one point I took Italy from a tax base of 0 to 14, I should have received $14 million instead of $1 million. Obviously, this mistake resulted in a cash poor and less dynamic game. Even so, control of countries changed hands several times and the game felt fluid enough to me. It will probably be improved by playing this rule correctly.

3) This one isn't so much a mistake, since we knew the correct rule, we just often failed to follow it. When you buy a bond the money should go to the treasury of that country but we often gave it to the bank out of force of habit. Even after we realized we'd done it wrong I think we kept doing it wrong, it's just so hard to NOT pay the bank. This also contributed to a cash poor game since countries weren't getting their money from investments they weren't able to pay out dividends as often as they should have been.

4) We played on the German side instead of the English side of the board.

Can't wait to play with the correct rules.

There are two published variants in the rule book, we played with the basic rule in each case:

1) We used the random setup for the initial distribution of bonds but there's a variant where players take turns buying bonds from each country and can keep a cash reserve if they desire. This should probably be the default rule since the basic rule is apparently broken for more than 3 players.

2) There's a variant for playing without the investor card in which all the players can invest in a country every time it hits the investor space. Personally, the investor card worked fine for me, with only three players it circulated around the board at a good pace. Perhaps with more players this variant would be more appealing.

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Tsuro

(August, Clint, Paul, Chris, Greg, Karen) x2

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Vegas Showdown

(August, Clint, Paul, Chris, Karen)

This my second time to play Vegas Showdown and the first time for the other players. I had played with Nick and Robert at the previous Saturday game session. The purpose of the game is to built a Hotel/Casino by bidding and buying "rooms". The common rooms consist of Lounge, Restaurant, and Slots. There are premier rooms which include Buffet, Table Games, Fancy Slots, and others. Placement of rooms are restricted to the type of room. Lounges can be placed anywhere on the board to any valid connecting room by connecting doorways. Hotel rooms (Blue colored rooms) can only be placed in the Blue (Hotel) or White areas and Casino rooms (Yellow colored rooms) can only be placed in the Yellow (Casino) or White areas. Everyone start with $20

First player gets the "Turn Order Button". On the "Turn Order Button" describes the steps for the round.

Step 1 is to reduce the prices of the currently available premier rooms.

Step 2 flips new tiles (rooms). This places new premier rooms in the open locations (normally three premier rooms available except in 4-5 player games). To place a premier room, an event card is played. The event card describes any variation for the round, like labor strikes. The event card determined by the size symbole on the card.

Step 3 collects money. The amount of money is determined by the player's lowest number between revenue and population. The values of revenue and population with change with the rooms placed on the player's board.

Step 4 chooses an action. This is the step that several things can happen. Starting with the player with the "Dealer Button", that player chooses from one of the following actions: Bid on a room, Renovate (move up to two existing rooms around on the player's board), Publicity. This step is like Amun-Re's bidding and every player has to do some thing. Once every player has chosen an action and has not been out bid, money is exchanged for the rooms and the action is performed.

Step 5 adjusts the Fame, Population, and Revenue.

Step 6 passes the "Turn Order Button" to the next player.

The game ends when one player fills his or her Hotel/Casino board or when a premier room is not available for the indicated event card. The winner is the player with the most Fame points after the "Final Scoring".

With the five player game, the game went fairly quickly. The three player game seemed to allow for a more complete Hotel/Casino by not running through the premier rooms as quick. I don't remember who won, but I know it was not me. I like the three player game better than the five player game. I would like to play a four player game to see how well it plays. Overall, the game is exciting due to the various layouts for each Hotel/Casino, along with the bidding wars.

-- AugustRatzlaff - 11 Mar 2007

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Quoridor

(Robert, Kevin) x2 (Robert, Kevin, Taylor)

I've been pushing this on people because it literally takes only about 5 minutes to play, yet it packs in enough strategy to keep things interesting (to me, anyway). Very quick filler. The rules only support 2 or 4 players. We tried a three player game, but it seemed unbalanced.

-- KevinLi - 05 Mar 2007

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O Zoo Le Mio

(Robert, Taylor, Kevin, Gary)

-- KevinLi - 05 Mar 2007

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For Sale

(Robert, Taylor, Kevin, Gary)

-- KevinLi - 05 Mar 2007

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Ticket to Ride

(August, Gary, Paul, Robert, Taylor)

I believe that Paul won with Gary a close second.

-- AugustRatzlaff - 11 Mar 2007

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-- MarshallPhilips - 05 Mar 2007
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