May 12th - Key Market

None of us could make Tuesday this week so we played on Thursday instead, that's just the kind of whacky thing we get up to round here!

Anyway, we played Key Market this week

Richard 130, Garry 107, Ben 104, Steve 103

May 5th - London

Three of us met at Richard's who had decided that we were to build the city of London. It initially seemed daunting, but Richard had coffee and caramel shortbread so it seemed rude not to try. I had never played before and Steve only a handful of times so after Steve and Richard read through the salient points and cobbled together a explanation we got off to a shaky start as I tried to grasp what I could and couldn't do. One thing I couldn't do was draw any cards as good as Richard's in the first few turns, but I stabilised on two loans having mistaken how the prison worked.

We all had quite big cities and ended up with 6 or 7 districts. There were some interesting card combinations- Steve had Hospital and Westminster working quite usefully.

Matt: 71, Richard: 61, Steve: 52

I won by getting the underground to work for me. I had 6 connected districts when a north river railway station funded 3 underground cards to generate 24 vps which was more than enough to counteract the poverty I was generating. It's a funny sort of 'detached' game where you never really feel involved in the play. I felt I was playing the game rather than the other players for most of it, there wasn't a great deal of interaction. I was idly ruminating on the style of game compared with Wallace's others and whether it had been play tested sufficiently as some of the cards were simply better than others for no real balance reasons. Steve remarked that Wallace's play testers were pretty experienced and had to find the holes in the game, but I wonder if he was using the right people? Wallace's other games are 'true' boardgames and the mindset required to perform well at Brass and Tinner's Trail is quite similar. I think London is different. You don't really need the board for a start, district tiles would easily suffice, and what you are left with is a combinable card game and that starts to stray into different territory where the CCGs lie. The 'geek is full of references comparing London to Race for the Galaxy and I don't think they are looking far enough. GOSU, Magic, Jambo and to some extent Agricola (although I think that may have been under-tested) have the sort of interactions that you see in London and getting people with ability at those games to test London might have resulted in better card balance that would lead to people having tougher decisions about what to discard rather than pitching away the obvious dross and hanging onto the more powerful cards. It's not a bad game, but not Wallace's best in my opinion and a lot lies in the execution rather than the idea, which seems sound.


Then

Oh dear, merciful, bugger. Bottle Imp. Three players were better than 4. Less chaos. More understanding on my part and significantly less rage than last time. I still managed to stuff up the final round and end with the tricky little blighter though. Steve and I succeeded in stuffing Richard royally in the first couple of rounds so the scores ended:

Richard: 26, Matt: 32, Steve: 85

April 26th - Tigris and Euphrates

Only 3 people this week, Tigris and Euphrates was the game of choice.

Richard 11 11 15 17, Steve 11 11 11 12, Matt 5 6 6 6

Then they went all fluffy and played O Zoo Le Mio

Crocodile Matt 127; Wild Boar Richard 126; Carcharadon Steve 116

April 19th - Caylus

I've not updated this blog for a while as I've been really busy, work, decorating etc. I have loads of scraps of paper with scores on so I'll try and get everything online over the next few days.

No Richard so we played Caylus, I could have won if I'd pushed the bailiff forward but decided not to and ended up last - arse!

Steve 104, Matt 93, Garry 91

12th April - Agricola

Another game of Agricola, 5 player family game.

Steve 35, Matt 30, Garry 29, Richard 26, Ben 22

Followed by a game of Geschenkt.

Richard 76, Matt 86, Steve 110, Garry 149, Benn 177

5th April - Agricola

I'm still off sick and Matt was away and Ben was working, so only Steve and Richard, here's Richards report:


I decided we should play 2 player Agriocola using the Interactive deck.

It's been a while since I played 2 player Agricola - and I think it was the first time Steve had played it.

2 Player plays very well - as it allows you to pay more attention to your opponent and predict what he will do - Which at times is nigh well impossible with higher player numbers!!

Anyway I came out on top - mainly due to my Lasso which allowed me to take two actions in a row if one of the actions involves taking animals - the killer action being when I took build fireplace and immediately took 4 sheep and cooked them - something that Steve thought I wouldn't do as I had nowhere to store the sheep.

Final score was as follows.

Richard 37, Steve 29

29th March - H20lland

I couldn't make it this week, here's a write up from Steve: After playing a lot of familiar games recently, to introduce them to Ben, I fancied trying something new and chose H2Olland as being the biggest 'big box' game in my collection that had a chance of finishing in an evening. I was a lttle concerned that it might not work well with 3, as the player starting in the 'middle' has no adjacent areas that only he can reach quickly, but the rules about where new farms can be started fix that, as long as the middle player is also the start player, as by chance he (Richard) was. The biggest problem with the game was that the resource production rates and the building costs do not mesh together very well. Everyone starts with the same selection of 'seeds' and no reason not to plant them all, so everyone then gets the same 'income' during the harvest, and pretty much has to buy the same stuff with it to avoid being left with unusable resources - as Matt pointed out, this is a 'rich get richer' game, so stockpiling isn't a strategy. Later in the game, everyone found that they were producing a lot more resources than they could spend, but were prevented from saving them because of the limit of 5 items that can be carried over. By the end everyone had placed all of their farms and windmills, and all of their workers were employed, so there was no potential for strategy decisions there, and the winner was simply the one who had fortuitously placed his windmills to give him a monopoly over the most valuable tulip fields. Perhaps if you had to maintain your buildings each year by paying, say, one resource of the type needed to build them for each one, and if you had to feed or pay your workers, then there would be more decisions to make. The issue of 'shared fields' also needs to be addressed, perhaps by requiring players to move workers to them before they can claim the resources, a la Keythedral. Anyway, the final scores, for which the players can claim neither credit nor blame, were: Steve 71, Matt 68, Richard 50