Thebes

The monthly The Central Texas Boardgames Meetup Group A.K.A. First Friday Fluffers was held today. I brought Thebes, which is the commercial reprint of Jenseits von Theben. Which is a nice and thematic game with only a little bit of the luck of the draw in it. This printing is very pretty. You get five individualized draw bags, spinning wheels to show columns in a table of dig data, and a nice game board. It is very different from its first edition. And it makes that first edition look like a prototype. Also, the rules have changed somewhat. I kind of miss the scoring for most well rounded knowledge. And the way the exhibitions are held…

Tichu

Jon was late as usual. So we played a couple of practice hands of Tichu. Which some how turned into a real game. Of pain…

Age of Steam: Korea

Picking a game for five players is hard. Well, if you want everyone to agree, that is. We decided on Age of Steam and for a variant chose the Korea map. This was a first playing for every one. So no one would have an advantage. The map is rather mountainous. But, fortunately, mountains only cost 3 dollars to build on. Also, there are some spots where you can’t build through that are marked with thick black lines. I guest those spots exist to make the map look more like the country that it is trying to represent.

The big difference here is that cities are not the color of the tile. Rather, a city will accept any colored good that is currently on top of it. This makes for a very changing game. One where you have to play tactically and over the short-term. Because other people will change your plans by delivering goods.

For some reason, the starting player bid was rather low. I got second place for 2 dollars. Jon was first and chose deliver first to allow himself some protection. Which is clearly more powerful in this game. I was very lucky to get locomotive! Doug chose build first, John chose turn order, and Ed chose engineer. Jon built off in the south east of the board. Doug built in the south west. And I built in the middle which allowed me to make two length two deliveries on the first turn. Ed built in the north east and was trying to set up a length two delivery by going through another city to get to his intended good. John chose a route in the north that connected to Ed’s target city.

When it got around to John making his first delivery. He chose to deliver one red good from the northern-most city to Ed’s target city. I quickly pointed out that he should have done that the other way. He should deliver the good in the target city to the northern-most. So that in the future, if someone were to deliver that good, at least it would have to go along his rail for one length. Unfortunately, I did this quickly and without thinking. After I said it, I realized that, if John were to change the move, it would hose Ed and leave him unable to deliver any goods that turn. Of course, in general, that is what you are supposed to do in this game. Now some people were clamoring for John to do exactly that. But, in the end, he chose to be nice to Ed. Ed later on in the game makes a delivery that helps himself and hurts John.

And this happened again in the game. John wondered whether he should build tracks and I replied that at least it would get you victory points even if you do not use those tracks to deliver goods. I then pointed out some cheap spots to build a track. And then realized that it would cut of Ed’s southern route from his northern route. Doh! I really should keep my mouth shut at this point. John picks somewhere else to build.

In this game, you can’t really compete with someone else over the same goods. Not without knocking both people out of the running for the game. However, after having a couple of rounds of loosing victory points for not having enough income, John was able to climb out of a death-spiral by delivering a number of length four goods. He was doing this in the middle of my territory. But I was occupying myself with longer deliveries.

Suicide Tichu

And finally we wanted one more quickish game to close out the night. Tichu, of course, came up again. We seem to always play this game — perhaps too much at times. But it is relatively easy to get all four people to agree to play it.

This time I wanted to try out a variant. I think it was Adam and Rehana that had mentioned suicide Spades. We discussed how it would work in Tichu and came up with the following, simple, rule: One person on each team must call Tichu (before they play their first card). I found a reference on BoardGameGeek called Chaos Tichu here. But it is a little more chaotic, so to speak.

I like this variant! It intensifies the gaming experience. You feel like you are in a crucible. You must make hard decisions with little information. When you pass a card to your partner, you pass your best card if it is clear you are not going to call Tichu. But what if they then play some cards without calling Tichu? Well, you are screwed and you have to call a doomed Tichu. There is more calling of Tichus before the pass. And the Mahjong is a little more powerful in this variant. If I am going to call Tichu and I have the Mahjong, then I wish out an Ace. If it doesn’t backfire, then the person on the opposing team must play an ace and then be forced to make a less likely Tichu call (or hose his partner).

Easy Come, Easy Go

Jon call me up at 6:30 and tells me he is still at work. Sigh… Where are your priorities, Jon?! So we played some light filler games. Three games of the dice fest called Easy Come Easy Go. And the winning condition certainly slipped in and out of your fingers easily enough.

Bunte Runde

After three games of Easy Come, Easy Go, we played a game of Bunte Runde. Without the rules. But we think that we remembered enough of the key points to get the gist of it correct. The only hiccup was during the final scoring and we just played that everyone would score all of their points.

Arkadia

Next up was Arkadia. Which was good. Definitely a recommended game to buy. My mistake was playing off by myself and not figuring out what colors upstream people were going for and to go after them as well.

During game play, Doug had this quote:

Men are tight in this game!

So that, coupled with the strange noises Doug kept making during the game (annoying his brother Jon), got us off on a tangent. We made strange noises as well and said that they were porn noises… Poor John dealt with us with patience.

Tichu

On Doug’s third Tichu call, he had two bombs (an eight bomb and a two bomb). And yet I still was able to stop him. I was a little bit too safe during this game. And it cost me the win. In hindsight, there were two Tichu calls that I could have made but didn’t. I considered making them before playing, of course. But, in the end, decided against it. Sigh…

Another gathering of Tex-Mex eating Tichuers at Mesa Rosa. I started off with a risky Tichu. On the next hand, Traci calls Tichu (you see her hand above) and then passes. Which is not usually done except when signaling your partner to not make a Tichu call or a random wish. John then over-Tichues and eventually goes out first. His play of trips was key since Traci did not want to get rid of her only three Aces.

On the last hand, I have AAAAKJ00765xx and I call Tichu before the pass. My partner passes me a King. Which is good. I like using these as singles since people will not usually play a Dragon or Phoenix on top of them. I split up my Aces during a pair battle and took a lot of points with them.

We left Mesa Rosa for the Mexican Ice cream store and played a couple of more hands…

Tichu

While we waited for Doug to show up, we played some Tichu. My 1223345555Ph777 somehow stopped Jon’s Tichu call. And, afterwards, John plays a 6 bomb. So there was no way Jon could have made that Tichu call…

Taj Mahal

I always like playing this Knizia game. Although with five people it can be tough to know what battle others will get into. You do not want to fight somewhere where everyone else is. I did make that mistake early in the game. In an elephant battle with two others. If I would have stayed out of it, I could have got second place. Still fun playing it though.

Tichu

And another game of Tichu to finish up the night. This one being a full game. On our second one/two both Dough and Mike had long run bombs. And yet they were unable to stop us from going out one/two. Doug’s was a length seven straight and in the lengthy questioning from Doug, the following statement came out:

Doug has the longest one I have ever seen!

Which led to much ribbing. On Mike’s second Tichu call, I had the above hand. Which contained the rarely played straight with a bomb inside of it. I think that it is the second-most annoying type of bomb (the intersection of two bombs (a straight and quads) being the first and the Ace bomb being the third) there is.

For our final one/two, I had AKKQJ and a Mahjong through nine with a Phoenix in there somewhere. Yet I didn’t call Tichu with it. Too wussy I guess.

We lost by 5 points! Argh! Close game though…

Wow, it has been almost a month since I have last played Tichu. Unfortunately, there were six people present to play a four player game. The only problem that I noticed was a minor one of not trying to feed point cards to the trick that Dragon takes. Here is a scenario: your partner goes out first and you are left with one other person. You know that the Dragon has not been played. So, on single card tricks, you play a King. This will force a remaining ace out of your opponent’s hand. Or, if your opponent plays the Dragon, it will go to your partner.

Notre Dame

I finally got a chance to play this game. Although it looked iffy that I would play a game for a while. I arrived a little late to the monthly meetup. Everyone had started a game already. After a while some more people joined and I tried reading the rules to Notre Dame but no one was paying attention. Thankfully, John had just finished his game and came over to explain the rules.

The game was interesting to play. Everyone has nine different action card in a draw deck. They draw three of them, pick one and send the remaining two to their left. Again, one card is picked and the remaining card is passed to the left. Now, out of the three cards in your hand (one you chose and two that were passed to you), you choose two to perform the action on the card. Sometimes the choices are tough and sometimes you have no good choice. You have a number of factors to balance during the game. You need to get cubes out of your supply to place on the board. You need to control the increasing population of rats (when the counter becomes too high, bad things happen). You need to get money during the game since money is tight. Oh, and by the way, you need to score some victory points!

With all of this random card drawing and useless card passing, there are some mitigating factors. You will go through your entire action deck three times during the game. And everyone will see the same majority of characters show up.

Tempus

Finally we have gone back and played a slightly older game that, at one time, was played frequently. Well, at least for a month or so. And then it was pushed off into a dark and dusty corner when newer games came into the spotlight.

This is a lightweight civilization that has been distilled down to its bare essence. Perhaps a little bit too much, in my opinion. The theme and feel has been eroded away and you only catch a brief glimpse of a civilization game here and there. But that is not too much of a bad thing since the game works just fine as an abstract game.

During the game play we were a little bit rusty. And far too pacifistic. I lost some crucial fights in some key eras. And that hurt me a little bit. At the end of the game, I was the last person to move. I had been planing an action for a while now. This was my last ditch effort to grab second place. And it just barely worked for me. Amusingly, Ed, who was clearly in first place, was complaining that I was playing king-maker. However, I ignored that accusation as it both attacked the leader and gave me a fighting chance for second place.

Blue Moon City

To end out the night, we played Blue Moon City. It is a game built from a two-player Knizia game. The beautiful artwork on the cards depicts many different races. You run around the board and turn in cards to build the corresponding color. Once from one to three of the spots on an area are filled, the majority owner gets a resource and everyone who builds gets another resource. Usually it is crystals which are turned in for victory points. But it can be cards or dragon scales as well.

It is a nice, lightweight game. One that doesn’t require much analysis. The only skill required is predicting what areas people will complete and timing aspects where you can get the jump on other people.

Colosseum

Tonight was all new games for me. Sometimes I think that too many games are released. First up was Colosseum. Which was a game that I was interested in playing. Being that its theme was about Rome. But John described it as putting on a play, and while that analogy was appropriate, it kind of ruined it for me. So Chapel and I amused ourselves by naming one of the play elements Christians. With Gladiators and Lions out to get them and cages to put them in. Fortunately, John is forgiving enough not to make a big fuss about it.

There are twelve possible components to a play and 30 different plays (with titles like The Galleys of Apollo, or The Cavalry of Spartacus). With only five game rounds, it doesn’t seem like there is a lot of things to do in this game. And you do not track cumulative victory points but the victory points in your best play (which generally progress to bigger plays with more victory points).

There are a lot of random aspects to this game. You roll dice to move spectators around a track and hope that they land inside your Colosseum. There are five groups of three tiles that you can bid on and you hope that useful tiles are drawn from the bag. Also, in the version of the game that we played, money was largely useless after a while.

I will have to take a wait and see attitude with this game. If I play it more, and if it turns out to be a better game, then I will buy it. Otherwise, I am content with letting someone else own it.

Arkadia

Next up was Arkadia. This was a more interesting game. No theme was explained to me which was fine in my book. It left it as an abstract game which is what worked best. Essentially, you are trying to collect tokens (of which there are colors) by surrounding a building with your pieces, other player’s pieces, neutral pieces, or other buildings. When a building is surrounded and the tokens are handed out, then the player will take a castle wall and place it on one of ten spots. This changes the number of visible colors when you look straight down. You may optionally cause a scoring which will allow you to trade your tokens for victory points. With only four possible scoring choices, you have to wait for the best time to use them.

This was an interesting game. And one that I am willing to play again.

Geschenkt

Chapel suggested this filler as we waited for people to show up. I took a bold strategy and took some high number cards with many chips on them. In this game, I started out with the 33, and , later on, got the 34. So when the 30 shows up, I am willing to keep adding chips to it until the pile builds up quite nicely. Ed surprised me a little bit by taking it with, I think, 10 chips on it. Of course, I was going to take it soon. But it still is -20 points to someone else…

Doug took low cards but was never able to fill in gaps. No one ran out of chips in this game. Although it got close some times. I ended up winning the game with close to half the score of the person in 2nd place.

Exxtra

Next up was this classic game. Which I love. I mean come on. It has dice, pushing your luck, and even some strategy to it. Maybe it was because it has been quite some time since this group has played this game. What ever the reason, the group dynamics were quite amusing. I would even say that they were the best I have ever seen. Jon (to my right) took the slow and steady approach. He would roll low the first time and then place the dice on the first spot. I could never roll great either, so I would use his protection factor and place my dice on spot number 2. Well, John would place his dice on 3, Doug would place his dice on 4. And Chapel would have no choice but to place it on 5. Each person was not risking a re-roll either. This left Ed severely hosed. All he could do was try and roll a number which would clear the board and place it on 0. Or roll and X and lose his turn. But he was in last place anyways. This kept happening and happening and there was nothing he could do about it. Finally he was pissed off enough to, instead of placing a rolled 76 on an open spot 5, place it instead on 0 and kick every one off. Somehow, I managed to eek my way into second place. Gravitt was able to be in a winning spot with no one else kicking him off. So I let him ride in for the win with me in second place.

Pickomino

Nick for some reason was running late. So we played yet another light and fluffy filler game. The dice, of course, acted strangely. I could rarely roll many fives at one time. While Chapel would. And then sometimes people would crap out only having two numbers locked out. Even though I could not roll well, the dice still loved me enough to give me the win.

Magna Grecia

Finally, we got to play a meaty game. One I think gets far less plays than it should. Perhaps it is the horrible color scheme. What ever the reason, it remains on my list of hidden jewels — rarely played but great games. I was the brown color in this game. For the first tile that was turned up, it was orange (Chapel), red (Ed), yellow (Nick), and brown (me) with 2 roads, 3 cities, and 3 resupply. Mike, as the first player was somewhat hosed. He did what I would have done and built a city (1) which connected up to a oracle. Ed was somewhat in a bad situation as well and decided to build off of Mike’s city and create a two city spot (2) hoping to eventually grab and control oracle B. Nick was new to this game. However, he made an excellent move. One that I desperately wanted to make myself. He built off of Ed’s city and created a three city spot (3). This would give him a commanding control of oracles A, B, C, and D! In fact, the very process of building roads to those oracles both claims the oracles (4 points) and gives his market 1 more point. At the end of the game, he could hope to have a city with ten connections and 4 oracles. Which would give him 26 points! Ed, of course, connected to oracle B with a road on aa. However, Nick did make a mistake and place a road on spot bb which connected to oracle C. This forever cut off his access to oracle B. He should have instead built a two road connection on spot bb to oracle B. Surprisingly, Nick left oracle A alone. Even though it was two spots away. I decide to build off of Nick and create a three city spot (4) as well. I had hoped to control oracles A,J, and H. However, as it later turned out, someone built on the village spot north west of my city and connected to the oracle. This cut off my ability to reach oracle H with my city. It turned out to be sad, but not entirely unexpected.

During the game, I noticed that Mike was planning to take over oracle J. I knew I had to act immediately. If Mike was able to place a road to oracle J, he would have a city with one more connection to it than I would have. This would give him final control over it and 4 points. So I placed a road along path z to connect to a village. This both cut Nick off from being able to connect to my oracle and stopped Mike from taking control of oracle J over. Since you need to have a city with more roads connected to it for its allegiance to switch over.

Tichu

To end out the night, we played a quick game of Tichu to 500 points. To start off, Mike made a rather non-standard Tichu call. John had already called Tichu and was winning tricks. Mike makes a Tichu call but does not play anything. Finally, he starts playing. But was not able to stop John and go out first. His had was revealed to be AAKKQQJJJJ085. I made a Grand Tichu call on two Aces and the Dog and was successful. On the third hand, I made another Tichu call. However, on the fourth and final hand, the other team made a Tichu and one/two for the win.