Game Night

Friday Nov. 6,2009 - Gamer's Inn
Headed over to the Inn to meet up with Mike Gingold, Bobby Warren and the regulars. Noah Antwiller got there about the same time and the four of us sat down to start the night with a game of Tichu. Bobby and I roared out to the lead with a couple good hands and some terrible ones for Mike. We then missed two Tichu calls and Mike and Noah were running away with the game. It finally looked grim as they needed only 15 points for a win while we were still at 510. However, Bobby and I then went Tichu 1-2 and pulled ourselves up to competitive. The last hand saw us manage to grab 90 points, but we couldn't go 1-2 for the win and came up short.
After that, we had six of us (Matthew Frederick and Amelia Boli showed up) so we played a quick game of Liar's Dice. Noah was out first on the second call of the game and a couple turns later, it was my turn. Mike and Matthew made it to the end and Matthew finished with the win.
Next up for the night was a four player game of Steam using the basic rule set. Mike, Matthew, Noah, and I sat down to the German side of the board. Having not have played Steam before, I wanted to see how the basic rules changed the game. Essentially, Steam varies from Age of Steam by a couple things. For one, you take 'shares' out at the point you need money - you do this by moving your marker back one spot for each $5 you need. This one thing makes the game a little less stressful, but also speeds things up a lot. Second, when you move a good, you must either score on the income track or score victory points. This is normally not a tough decision, but near the end of the game, you have to balance out your spending or you can give up critical points. In the basic game like we played, you pick an action, and that determines the turn order for the next round. The "better" actions also cost money in addition to pushing you to the end of the turn order next round. Finally, the best change is the goods. Rather than random, there are sets of three goods in piles. When you choose the goods action or urbanization, you pick which goods pile you want. This is the best change of all of them and adds back a nice piece of strategy from a simplified version of AoS. Overall, it was good and faster than AoS. I'd rate this pretty high and I though I like AoS better still, I'd definitely chose this for a quicker AoS fix. I even managed to win this one. Charles:55, Noah: 50, Matthew: 48, Mike: 40-something.
We ended the night trying a three player game of Chaos in the Old World. Three player definitely changes the dynamic a little and I have to say that a second playing shows how fast this game can be. Mike, Matthew, and I finished in a little over an hour including explanation of the rules to Matthew. I was Slanesh, which meant I was trying to lay corruption in areas where there were noble markers or hero tokens. I was nailing huge sections, while keeping Matthew's Khorne forces from killing me. I ran the dial around very quickly and won. I think for three players, the game would be better without Khorne, as I was able to easily limit Matthew's ability to kill anyone.