February 2008 Game of the Month

In the Year of the Dragon is my February 2008 game of the month. This was a bit of a surprise to me. This one was played late in the month (a month which was low in plays). I had purchased this one for no other reason than it was an Alea big box game. I had heard some small rumblings that it was a decent game and I was surprised to find a good gamer's game here. The game itself is fairly easy to learn, and yet there are a number of different approaches that one can take. The mechanics are a new interesting mix to me (get greedy and it costs you your place in turn order, which is often VERY important to getting the limited resources available). I expect that in a while this one will be over-played and over-analyzed by the BGG community, but for me, this one should be fun for a while.

Other games in contention this month - Vinci saw a couple plays (and one a win for me) via Vassal. Wabash Cannonball took up a chunk of my time as I worked and rework (and continue to rework) a new map. I also managed a couple plays of this and I still enjoy it. I've played with three and five players and its still good (better with the bigger map and bigger cubes and better stock certs).

Trading Fool

I've been a trading fool as of late. An Ultimate Trade got me a copy of Edel, Stein & Reich. Shortly after that I traded off Liberté and Samurai Swords in a math trade for Battle Cry and Age of Steam. Now, it should be noted that I traded Battle Cry away a couple months ago for a new copy of Diplomacy (the new AH/Hasbro version of course), so I had to get it back. I picked up Age of Steam, not because I love the game (I do), but because it would be easier to trade than Samurai Swords and because its probably a trade up in value so long as John Bohrer continues to be an ASSHAT. I also got two new laminated maps out of the deal - Japan and Umbria. I currently have it (minus those two maps) in an Ultimate Trade in an effort to try and get a hold of Antiquity. I've been approached about getting OUTPOST if I was willing to up the ante on my end (Outpost is easily a $200-$300 game). If I get no hits, I may very well consider throwing in some of my AoS maps on top to see about Outpost. I don't really want Outpost, but lots of folks do, so...
I also just made a trade for a game I've been wanting for a while - Himalaya. I can't keep waiting for Matthew Frederick's Everest ;) I was able to get the base game and the 5-6 player expansion in exchange for a new copy of Betrayal at House on the Hill and for my Age of Steam map - Disco Inferno. This particular map (sadly) never got played. However, I was willing to part with it since IT DOESN'T FIT in my AoS case. Its been an interesting last few weeks.

Game Night

Feb. 22, 2008 - Game Shoppe
Mike Garrett, Justin Kosec and I planned to meet up at the Game Shoppe for some Friday night gaming. I got there just ahead of Mike and Justin and sat down with Mike Spoto to eat my fast food. Mike S was busy opening Race For the Galaxy and after I finished eating, I offered to teach him how to play. Justin had walked in at that point and we were also joined by Will Suacier. I went over the rules, using the backwards order for the actions and Will and mike seemed to grok the rules quickly. We played with the starting beginner hands and off we went. Will started dropping cards left and right while I worked on military might. Mike went heavily into the brown and was getting cards easily left and right. Justin? I'm not sure what he was doing, but he took a while to do it. Will ended the game with a 12 card build and won. I couldn't ever find any 6 bonus cards for military (as Will had been holding them).
Mike G had arrived in the middle of our game and so we now had five. As there was no real decision on a game being made, I pulled out my new Wabash Cannonball map. Despite its flaws, the bigger map and cubes are much easier to play with (and anything is better to look at). I explained everything and off we went. Mike G won the PA (red), I won B&O (blue), Will took C&O (yellow) and Mike S won New York (green). On his first turn, Justin put red up for bid, and won that. Shortly after that he and Mike G ran track to cut the B&O off. Not being happy with that turn of events, I grabbed a share of green and started helping Mike S increase that stock value. Will grabbed a second share of yellow and Justin managed to get the third (last) share of red. Mike G now realizing that he was getting behind and that his interest in red was far and away helping Justin more, bid for and got a share of B&O (blue)! We laughed at him a bit, buying a stock for a line he had screwed earlier, but I helped him to increase its value and get into Pittsburgh. Meanwhile, the other lines grew with no unexpected things happening in a first game (for Mike S, Will, Justin) - green ran the northern cities, yellow the southern - red and blue ran short of cash in the middle. I ran green to Chicago for the +7 income and dividends. Mike then took Wabash, gambling that his $10 bid would be recoup-able (he did get his line to Detroit, and got in two dividends, thus making a small amount). When we added it all up, I was out in front by about $10-20. I really like this one, but would be less happy playing the original with the crappy map and small bits...
Next out was Ca$h and Gun$. Mike G keeps laughing at me, since I've only rated this a 6.5 yet I keep asking him to bring it out. I had had a long week and wanted some dumb fun, but I don't think I'm changing my rating. It still is what it is. The winner (Will) was unsurprising as he took one haul all by himself.
The last game of the night was a new one to all of us as I pulled out In the Year of the Dragon. This is one I got because it was an Alea/RG big box, but had been hearing good things on, so I wanted to give it a go. This game has a couple of pluses to me - the rules are simple and its easy to teach (I basically read the summary bars out of the instructions to everyone and we started playing) and its full of interesting tough choices. It was a good mix of mechanics that didn't make this feel like many other games I had tried before. Essentially, there are 12 games turns. Each turn, an event happens (though the first two are always - peace/nothing). Each event is typically something bad - taxes, plague, invading Mongols, etc. There are two of each event and one pair is benign (firworks) but earns players VPs. So the game is about planning for the up coming disasters while trying to sneak in as many VPs. on a turn, players pick an action, then pick a person to come to a palace (people give you things during the action or scoring), then the event occurs, then there is scoring and you repeat. That's the game. Most of the people come in two flavors - simple bonus or much better bonus. The interesting part of this is - turn order is determined by the value of people you have selected. Choose a good bonus and you don't move far on the turn order track. Take a lesser bonus and you shoot out on the turn order, allowing you to choose your action before the others (the first to choose an action gets it for free, those after the first have to pay for the privilege). Its really a nice mix of angst. Like PR, I think this may have a limited amount of re-playability as people start figuring out the "engine" (there are already a number of strategy threads on the geek), but I'm guessing this will see some play with the folks in this area for a bit. BTW, Mike G squeaked out a two point win over me here and despite winning this the first time out (he normally dislikes any game he wins the first playing of), Mike seems willing to give this another go.

V is for Victory (in Vinci)

Wooooo. I held on for the win in our PBEM game of Vinci. Near the end, I went into decline with forts, and everyone left those guys alone the whole rest of the game - scored me 7 points a round. My new civ was medicine (add a new guy each turn) and general (+7 temporary guys each turn). This let me grab up pretty good chunks of points while I waited for the ending. Matthew took it upon himself to wipe me out, and he came close. We were playing the variable ending game and so I was just hanging on hoping for the end roll, otherwise Matthew and Jason were very likely going to pass my by. On the 6th try for end game, we got it. Whew. We had a bit of a discussion about the endgame in Vinci and we've decided that we prefer the faulty, yet original ending. Yes, the endgame as it stands has a kingmaker issue, but at least for this group of players, that's not an issue - we don't tend towards favorites and play to maximize our (or minimize the leader's) scores. The random endpoint ends up just being exactly that - random. At least with the known endpoint, you have to plan your for your last couple of civs. We'd rather have to deal with the kingmaker issue than have a random winner.

Slow Month

This has been a pretty slow month for me for gaming. Other than a couple web games, not much going on. I just finished up a game of Tikal on SpielByWeb. The person that setup the game chose to simply go with random draw tiles (which plays 1000x faster than playing with Justin Kosec ;) ). I played ok, but nothing special and ended up in a distant 3rd. GreatWolf won, and won big - obvious about 3 turns out big.
I managed to get my revised Wabash Cannonball map done. You can see it here. Too bad I did it at too low a resolution :(. I'm going to re-start it in another day or two to try and clear up the "blurriness" of the town names and such. Otherwise, I was pretty happy with how it turned out. Friday is game night - I hope to get in a handful of decent new games and at least one play of my new Wabash map.

Interesting

The results are in from the latest math trade. I'm trading away my copy of Samurai Swords (which I wanted to play for the longest time, but not any more) and Liberte. In exchange, I'm getting Age of Steam and Battle Cry (plus a game called Dixie - Bull Run. Yes, I traded away Battle Cry for Diplomacy (AH/Hasbro) version a few months ago - now I'm looking at it like I traded Liberte for it instead. Whatever. Its interesting that I'm trading for AoS. The box has a ding, but I don't care in the least - I have a box - its empty. I'm probably going to do an ultimate trade and see if I can't get something cool. This math trade, the AoS guy is getting Indonesia, which I really wanted. Ah well.

Blue Moon

When I first heard about this game, I was intrigued. Here was a non-collectible card game that let you do deck building (assuming you bought the expansions). It was pretty simple to learn and short to play. I got it in a trade and after trying it out, I traded it away. It wasn't that it was a bad game, but more that I really didn't have anyone to play it with, and its the kind of game that (I think) gets better the more often you play - meaning you need a regular opponent. Well, I discovered that there is a computer version of the game available. You can download the game here. Now, it won't let you build decks (that I can tell), but it does have the following decks: Hoax, Vulca, Mimix, Flit, Khind, Terra, Pillar, and Aqua. The game interface is well done and easy to use. Additionally, it won't let you make an illegal play. So, if you are interested in trying this game out, grab the files and set it up.

Wabash Map

Original	Mine

Ok, I hate the stupid Wabash Cannonball map. It sucks. Not just because its spartan, but because its only barely functional:
- Its small and fiddly to deal with, especially with the dinky game cubes
- It is nearly devoid of color - the small colors are VERY small shapes in the corner of each hex.
- The numeric codes in each hex are not intuitive in the least.
So, I'm working on a new map. I started out with hexes the size of AoS hexes. I plan to use Age of Mythology cubes, which are a lot bigger than the AoS sized good cubes, so bigger hexes is a must if for no other reason than this. I decided to try and stick to the basic color scheme - yellow=farm, green=timber, blue=mine, brown=industrial. I used Paint Shop Pro's textures to fill the hexes with color, without "filling" the hex. I even tried for textures that were related - yellow/farm/grass, green/timeber/wood grain, blue/mine/stone, brown/industrial/bricks. I also found images and made smaller hexes for inside the hexes so that the colors were more like secondary indicators to the pictures of a farm, stack of logs, coal train, factory silhouette and city hall (for cities). For the starting hexes, I found logos from the original companies and re-did the colors a bit (rather than using the ones JB did for his map, as I didn't want to be accused of using any of "his" graphics.
Most importantly, I've clarified the meaning of the numbers (well, at least to my mind). The cost of the hex is clearly shown in the hex itself. For the cities, I've added two "plus" numbers the first is the amount you add to the company's value when you build there. The second is the amount you add when you industrialize the city. So rather than the obtuse 2/2/3 for Ashland, you have a 2 in the hex, and +2 +1. Why in God's name anyone thought that the code should be 2/2/3 not 2/2/1 is beyond me. Did they think it sped things up to do the math for you in case you were the second line to build into an industrialized city?
Anyway, this is a sample of what I have so far. I had originally thought I'd do each hex as the picture, but it was WAY too busy and I couldn't get the numbers (for cities) to stand out in a meaningful way. I will likely end up shrinking this a bit, as I'd really like to get the scoring and action piece onto the board, rather than having them as a separate entity. I'm not nearly done, so I'm certainly open to comments / criticisms.

Vinci - Vassal

Tried out a new game via Vassal - Vinci. This is a pretty decent game and not bad PBEM. I played with Jason Maxwell, Matthew Frederick and Mike Gingold of the AZ Gamers. I started it up and then turn order was Matthew, Jason, and Mike. Most of us hadn't played Vinci in a while, which was ok, since we got to take as much time as we liked, however without someone there to remind you, its easy to forget the other civ's powers (and your own). I know I forgot to use my civ powers once and I think Jason forgot to count his declined civ's points at least once. The game was really over about 4 rounds from the end, when Mike's crazy civ with super defense took over half the board. He put it in decline and still scored like 17 points from it over the next few turns (might have been more). Matthew and I were chasing and Jason just kept hoping for the end of the game. We played with the variable ending and it didn't matter in the least. Mike easily won: Mike-146 Matthew-134 Charles-132 Jason-115. This one doesn't get regular play and is fun enough that it'll probably stay in the PBEM rotation for a bit.

Game Night

Feb. 1, 2008
Headed back down to the Game Shoppe this week to meet up with Mike Garrett for some gaming. We were hoping to grab some other players, but planned on it just being the two of us. When I got there, Mike had pulled out Filthy Rich, an older Richard Garfield game that I had never heard of. We pulled in a kid that shows up at the shop a lot - Tom Nelson and Mike explained the game. This game is really cool in that the game board is a binder. You play a business that makes billboards. You build the billboards by placing the cards for the boards into slots in pages (card sleeve pages) in the binder. There are four pages, and so you can cover up (or get covered), depending on which page is active. There is quite a bit of randomness in dice rolling to get paid, and in the event card deck, but the game plays quickly and has a unique mechanic. I wouldn't want to play this a load, but its interesting enough I probably would play it again when it comes out (plus I won).
After that, I had Mike keep out the money and I pulled out my homemade copy of Wabash Cannonball (which is only slightly less cheesy than the original). I'm working on a nice copy, but I wanted to get this to the table now, so I printed out a quick and crappy copy of the original map. I explained the game to Tom and Mike and we got started. Tom took PA (red) and New York (green) in the initial auctions, I got B&O (blue) and Mike had C&O (yellow). I made a pretty decent effort at nabbing the second blue stock to go up for auction, then poured all the money into pushing blue well up in value - only at the end of the game did I let a stock go to another player and the first three landing in my lap pushed me out to an easy win. This one isn't terribly hard to learn, but takes a playing to see how quickly it plays and to get what sort of value to give a company during auctions. I still need to play this with 4-5 players, but I still feel that this a decent game - its fast and has interesting choices. After I finish my "deluxe" version, I'm going to want to play this even more.
Tom had to take off, so Mike pulled out Quoridor for us to play while we waited for his other friend Mike to show up. I had seen him playing this before, so knew how to play. I wasn't that interested in playing, as I had seen how this would not be a terribly interesting abstract, but I also knew it was quick, so I gave it a go. I had boxed Mike in pretty decently, then screwed up and let him hose me. It was soon after pointed out that I could have kept it from happening to me - which normally would make we want to play again, but this game just never struck a chord with me.
When Mike Linder arrived, Mike Garrett suggested Age of Steam. Linder, despite never having played was interested in trying it out. I got out France for us, as this works well enough with three players. The setup for us was interesting in that there were only a couple black cubes on the board, as well as on the goods chart - black would not be seen much in this game. It also meant that Paris was going to get loads of colored goods. Mike G grabbed a two hop route into Paris right away, so I sucked it up and started a route that would not let me move goods the first turn. Instead I got my engine to 3 in preparation for the second turn. After that, it started to look like it'd be Mike G's game (I had had to dig into the share pool while he did not), but I kept on making 4s and 5s while Mike ran out of those and in the mid-end game kept getting stuck running 3s and 4s. When we tallied up the scores, I finished 2 pts ahead of Mike G for the win - coincidently, two points I took from Mike when I urbanized a town out from under one of his routes.

January 2008 Game of the Month

Unsurprisingly to me, Starcraft easily makes my January 2008 game of the month. This beauty came to me thanks to winning a $100 gift cert to ThoughtHammer. The giant box is loaded with the standard Fantasy Flight fare - tons of minis, big glossy rulebook, thick cardboard pieces, and loads of cards. This game scratches just about the same itch that Game of Thrones does for me, but should play well with 3-4-5 equally. I'm not convinced that Game of Thrones with A Clash of Kings Expansion isn't the better choice for this itch with 6 though. But - what's not to like? It does exactly what the video game did so well at - it balances three completely different races (and here it even goes one more step, breaking each race into two factions). Each faction requires a different approach, and the game board is uniquely built each game - in fact, setting up the game board is part of the game and influences a lot of things. Expect this one to take 45-60 minutes a player (not including rules). The length is one of the few downsides to this one.

Other games in contention for January? Memoir '44, which saw a ton of action with Jason Maxwell via Vassal. Ca$h 'n Gun$ was also new to me and I had a riot each time I played it.

Game Night (Wherein Mike and Charles Have a Few Laughs)

Friday - Jan. 25, 2008
Mike Garrett and I headed out to the Game Shoppe for a bit of gaming. They were having a Ticket to Ride tourney, but I didn't think Mike had much interest, and so I brought a load of stuff to play with Mike and his friend Mike Linder. When we all were there, I asked Mike what he was up for and told him what I had brought - he said we can either play Starcraft or a whole lot of other games. Well, it was no surprise to me that he choose Starcraft. We saw Scott sitting around not playing Ticket to Ride, so we invited him to join us, and another of guy Mike knew named Conrad Engel also joined us. We pulled out the game, picked sides and I started in on the rules. The players /factions were: Charles/Green/Zerg, Mike G/Blue/Terran, Mike L/Orange/Protoss, Scott/Red/Terran, Conrad/Purple/Zerg. As I was going through the rules, another guy Scott knew (Tom) joined us for the 6th player (Tom/Yellow/Protoss). Having played before, I started as first player - Mike G the only other player to have tried out the game would be second. We got setup with a fairly interesting board. Unfortunately for me and Mike L/Orange, we both drew the only two worlds without a conquest point space on our first draws. This ended up being really bad for Mike L/Orange, as his second world was the two area world, leaving him resource short to start the game. I ended up a bit on the fringe and was happy. We played through two rounds and then Mike G pointed out something to me that we had both overlooked in our first playing - special victory conditions can only happen in the 3rd stage of the game. We had taken that to mean the third phase (place order, execute orders, regroup) and had thus ended our first game really early. Mike and I both looked at each other and laughed, realizing that we hadn't been planning on the game lasting this long. We both immediately took a turn to regroup and concentrate on upgrades. We also agreed not to tell the Justins until we had to. The fighting started almost immediately, with yellow attacking randomly. This proved to be his downfall, as he got immediately squashed (and eliminated) by Conrad/purple. This turned out to give the game to Conrad, who then spent the rest of the game turtled in his Zerg swarm with his special victory condition in place, and a good lead on us in the conquest points. The rest of us were busy battling back and forth. After about 4 turns, Scott had to leave, but his place was taken by Sam who had played three times before, so he jumped right in. Interestingly enough, we corrected him on a couple rules, which probably changed the game for him a bit, he also didn't have much of a chance having to take over for someone else. He did managed to nearly eliminate Mike/Orange. Mike/Orange somehow managed to stay alive and then hoped to try and last to 15 before the third stage could hit. It was not to be, and after 6 turns, we hit the third stage. Conrad had been pulling as many event cards as he could to speed up the game and it worked. four of us hit our victory conditions but we were all at least 3 points behind Conrad. It was a long game, but I'm still pretty sure that if everyone knows the rules, its maybe 45 min a player. My only real complaint so far is that the game takes up a huge amount of space - more than any game I know.
We finished up and Mike grabbed Ca$h and Gun$, which was the same brain-refresher we needed after the last Starcraft game. Sam left, and we were joined by Becky and her boyfriend Heath. The smack talk started before we even had all the pieces out and we were laughing the rest of the game. A good end to the night (plus I won).

** Um, I didn't win. Mike G and I tied. Then of course the tie breaker is the guy with the least shame (tie) and then the guy with the most wounds. Of course, I hadn't been shot, but Mike had, and he won.

Memoir - Charles vs Jason Maxwell

GATES OF MOSCOW
This was a fairly large fight (to 7 pts) that pits the Russians against a huge invading force. Jason basically had his back two rows filled with units. Realizing that he'd be tank blitzing the hell out of me, I took a risk and tried to push him early, hoping that a few flags would help thin him out a bit. Sadly, I hardly rolled any and only managed a paltry 3 kills before Jason finished me off.
Total score: Axis: 183 - Allies: 173
Eastern Front: Axis: 13 - Allies: 7

Battle Cry - Charles vs Jason Maxwell

Well, we finished the Civil War (sort of). The last of the official scenarios was Glorieta and Jason beat me a lot 5-2. That made it 106-95. I'm vaguely interested to know if it'd be similar if we did it again, but not interested enough to actually find out...

Memoir - Charles vs Jason Maxwell

We started into the Eastern Front expansion with [RUSSO-FINNISH WAR] SUOMUSSALMI. I'm not sure I'm a fan of this expansion from the Russian player side at all. I dislike having to expose my next card. At least for this scenario, it turned out ok, as the weaker ski troopers were getting whittled down pretty quickly. I had one nice turn where I nailed 3 of Jason's units out of nowhere. I surprised myself and pulled out a 6-4 win. Creeping closer and closer the war is now Axis: 174 - Allies: 172

**UPDATE
We are replaying this. Turns out, the card I play under the chip isn't face up - due to the interface I didn't realize that until Jason read the blog. After further review - its not face up. However, I didn't get the timing quite right, so we are going to redo it. The redo went against me 6-4 which changes the score to Axis: 176 - Allies: 170

Battle Cry - Charles vs Jason Maxwell

SAVAGE STATION - Jason and I had to restart this one after about 4 turns, because on my first turn, I started playing the wrong side of the map and Jason didn't apparently think anything of it and just assumed the other...

So after that... There was a rail line and some special rules for that - turned out not to matter a whit, since we played almost the entire game on the other side of the map. In fairly standard BC play, I ran across the map trying to make a charge to hit Jason's forces before he could inflict too much damage. This time, it didn't work. Jason won 6-4 to make it 101-93 for the war. Only one official scenario left...

Memoir - Charles vs Jason Maxwell

[NORMANDY] BATTLE OF THE BRIDGEHEAD
The war is slowly evening up between us. Here was another fairly standard scenario where I was able to get my tanks into play (and they lasted long enough to do some reall damage). A 5-2 win for me makes it Axis: 170 - Allies: 166

Memoir - Charles vs Jason Maxwell

Jason and I continued our recent Memoir games with [ITALY] THE GOTHIC LINE. This was a fairly straightforward affair with lots of varied terrain. The fight was pretty even and went back and forth, with Jason taking a 3-2 lead in the game. I was then able to use a tank attack to kill then weaken a unit allowing another unit to finish the weaker one to take a nice 4-3 lead. Jason blew up my infantry that had just taken out his guys to tie it all up. Then I noticed that this scenario only went to 5 medals, so I ran a tank into a town and claimed the last medal to win 5-4. The total score is now Axis: 168 - Allies: 161. As a side note, this is now the 10th game of Memoir I've played already this year, making it a dime for 2008 17 days in!

Blokus Trigon vs THE TOB

My sister and I played some Blokus Trigon again tonight (apparently we did before and I missed logging it). Anyway I had some form of Blokus Trigon dyslexia tonight and couldn't see the shapes correctly. We played to a tie, but apparently the tie breaker online is TIME. I lost despite a 197-197 score. Ah well.

Battle Cry - Charles vs Jason Maxwell

LEETOWN (Pea Ridge) - Jason and I fired up Battle Cry again. After whipping through so many of the Memoir scenarios recently I was surprised at the slow pace of this game (despite knowing the game was slower). It had apparently been a while since this had been dragged out - April of 2007 to be exact. At any rate, this particular battle was fairly standard as far as BC fights went - I made a charge, Jason made a charge, and in the end, he outlasted me. Jason won 6-4 and the Confederates are now ahead 95-89 for the war. I think I'm going to drop my rating on this game again. Its still a good game, and so far, I think it captures the feeling of the combat for the period better than the other Command and Colors games, but its just not as fun as the others.