Wichita Boardgamers

Session Report for Saturday, 03/18/2006

6 Players, 3 Games

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Poison

(Scott, Chris, Chad, Marshall)

MarshallPhilips -

There were four of us at first but we were pretty sure more were going to arrive so we decided to start with a quick filler and Poison fits the bill. This is an extremely quick and addicting game that's perfect for filling up little bits of time as it can be started and stopped on a dime.

If you haven't played Poison it's a card game in which you play a potion card from you hand and try to avoid picking up the cards in the pot. Cards are worth points at the end of the game and the lowest score wins. There are three "cauldrons" in the game each of which can hold cards (potions) of a certain color. On your turn you play a potion into a cauldron of the matching color. Each potion has a number on it and if the sum of all of the potions in the cauldron exceeds 13 then you must pick up the cards and put them in your score pile. Like I said you want to avoid picking up cards but there's a twist because whoever has the most of each color will be able to set them aside without scroing them. So if you pick up a few blue potions you might consider trying to pick up more in order to get the most. Another twist is the Poison cards which can be played into any cauldron. Poison cards are worth double points at the end so you desperately want to avoid taking those.

And that's it really, it's a very simple game and plays very quickly. The thing that makes it challenging is deciding whether to play your highest numbered cards first (for obvious reason you want to get rid of your highest cards since lower cards give you more flexibility to play without putting you over the 13 point limit) or playing out all cards of a certain color first. In this game I followed the color first strategy and was able to do quite well. The key to this strategy is that once you empty your hand of a given color you want to dump all your poison cards on that color. You know you'll never be forced to take them but the other players will.

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Power Grid

(Scott, Chris, Karen, Kevin L. Chad, Marshall)

MarshallPhilips -

Towards the end of Poison Karen and Kevin showed up which gave us six players and we decided to go for Power Grid next. Power Grid is generally considered to be one of the heavier euro games. The rules aren't all that complicated but the strategy can burn your brain and there's a lot of basic math involved. Here's a quick rundown of the rules.

In the game players represent power companies who operate power plants to deliver electricity to cities, the government pays the players a fixed rate based on how many cities they can power. In the end the winner is the player who can power the most cities. As you can guess Power Grid is an economic game at heart, it's all about getting money and spending it wisely in order to extend your network the fastest. Efficiency is key. The game is played over several turns each turn follows these steps.

• Establish Turn order
  • Turn order constantly changes during Power Grid. Basically the more cities you have connected the higher you are in the turn order. You might think it's good to be high in the turn order but generally it's not because many of the following steps are conducted in reverse turn order. So turn order in the game serves a kind of a brake on the leaders to keep them from running away with it. Manipulation of your position in the turn order is a very important strategy to master in Power Grid. Sometimes you want to be last to get cheap fuel, sometimes you want to be first to get the most money. Timing is everything here.

• Buy Power Plants
  • Each turn players get the chance to buy one power plant if they desire. Plants are put up for auction and the highest bidder gets the plant. Everybody gets a chance to buy one plant though. Players may have at most 3 operational plants at one time. If they buy a fourth they have to scrap one of the existing ones. Plants burn fuel (coal, oil, trash, uranium) to power cities. Some plants are more efficient than others but generally the more expensive plants power more cities for a given amount of fuel.

• Buy Fuel
  • Starting with last place players can now buy fuel. The way fuel works is rather ingenious in that the four types of fuel (coal, oil, trash, uranium) are laid out on a track with high prices at one end and low prices on the other. Players buy fuel from the low price end, every time they take a unit of fuel the price automatically increases for the next unit (because it is higher on the price track) and so on until fuel gets very expensive. At the end of the turn a fixed quantity of fuel is added to the track thus lowering the price. This represents supply and demand very eloquently as fuels which are in high demand will tend to increase in price until they are exhuasted all together. Fuels in low demand will stay relatively cheap. It's all about the relative balance between fuel being removed from the market (purchases) and added to the market (replentishment). The market will automatically adjust until those are in equilibrium. Playing the market correctly is a big aspect of the game

• Connect Cities
  • Starting with last place players may not connect cities on the map to their network. There is a fixed connection cost between adjacent cities which the player must pay. A player can connect any city on the map but must pay the connection cost to his nearest city. This can get quite expensive if his nearest city is not adjacent to the one he is connecting so most players try to keep their networks compact. In extreme cases when adjacent cities are unavailable (because they have been claimed by opponents) a player may pay to "jump over" the bottleneck by paying the connection costs to a distant city, this is a last resort however. Because of the high cost of skipping over cities there is a certain race aspect involved where you try to lock up nearby cities before your opponents can get to them. At various stages in the game cities grow and can host more than just one or two power companies in which case connections that were previously blocked are now open again. So the game goes through stages of racing for cities only to have the board open back up and start the race again. It's all very tense and requires good planning.

• Fire Plants
  • In the final step of each turn players burn their fuel in order to fire their plants and power their cities. They get paid based on how many cities they power. The money they earn here is used to buy better plants and more fuel in the next turn.

This was the first game for Karen, Kevin, and Chad and only the second game for Chris and Scott. When you have new players the rules actually suggest only playing the first stage of the game because it can be very unforgiving and inexperienced players can easily get themselves into an untenable situation. Impressively, there was no need to reset this game after the first stage as all players had done a good job of managing their companies so we continued ahead with the full game.

Kevin became the trash magnate by buying most of the trash plants that came up for sale while Chad went with wind plants at first (wind plants have the advantage of needing no fuel but are more expensive to buy) and Scott went nuclear. The fuel market stayed on the cheap side because all of the wind plants were purchased and put into play, when this happens there is less demand for fuel. Towards the end of the game as some of the wind plants were retired fuel prices did start to edge up but there was no danger of a shortage as can frequently happen. Karen triggered the end of the game by connecting to her fourteenth city but I managed to win the game by powering fifteen cities. I had only bought four power plants through the game and the money I saved in capital costs I was able to invest in connecting cities. This proved to be the difference. Still, everybody played very well, Power Grid is not an easy game your first time out because the importance of turn order is not obvious at first and you don't know when to wait for better plants and when to buy now. I'm looking forward to playing this one some more now that more people are familiar with the mechanics.

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Tutankhamen

(Scott, Chris, Karen, Kevin L., Chad, Marshall)

MarshallPhilips -

After Power Grid I knew I didn't really have time for another game but Scott suggested progressively shorter and shorter games until he got to one so short I couldn't turn it down. And I'm glad I didn't! Tutankhamen is one of those games where you read the rules or you hear about it and it doesn't exactly strike you as special. But the playing of it transcends the rules, it's really quite a clever and fun game that works surprisingly well with six players. If it works just as well with two I'll probably have to put it on my buy list.

In Tutankhamen you start with 14 gold coins which you're trying to get rid off. You get rid of coins by collecting sets of egyption artifacts. The sets are numbered 1 through 8 corresponding both to the number of like tiles in a set and the number of gold you can get rid off if you have the most tiles from a set. The tiles are randomly arranged in a line and a players turn is equisitly simple. The player simply moves his pawn forward any number of tiles that he would like and claims the one he lands on. The key is that a player can never move backwards so any tiles he passes by are forever out of his reach. When the last tile of a set is claimed that set is scored with the majority holder paying his coins and the second place holder paying one half of the value of the set. First player to get rid of his coins wins.

Within these simple rules is an intriguing game of trying to out guess your opponent and trying to resist temptation by racing too far ahead to claim a desirable tile. Seems like the type of game that would work well with kids or adults which is another reason to pick it up.

-- MarshallPhilips - 19 Mar 2006
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