Blue Moon City

Mike had us over for the college football game (#1 Ohio State vs. #2 U.T. Austin). I was hoping for a nice lively game on Mike’s new HD-TV. But with Vince Young gone, U.T. was playing poorly.

John brought Blue Moon City for us to try. This is another new Knizia game (surprise, surprise) that uses artwork from his Blue Moon series. It was a nice game. And one that I will play again.

You move your piece around the board and try to build (cities?). When all of the spots on a tile are filled up, crystals are then awarded according to the majorities. Completed tiles also give bonuses to orthagonal tiles (snowballing the crystal income). In the middle of the board, you offer your crystals to the obelisk for one of four needed spots. The person who completes four spots wins the game. Pretty simple.

Oh yeah, perhaps I didn’t watch the game because the view of the TV was blocked! Flawed!!

Tichu

Mikey likes Tichu now! So I am obligated to force him to play. And Gravitt gets caught in the cross-fire. I’ll turn them both into Tichu players yet…

This was a painful game for me. There was a lot of random wishing. Jon started it out by wishing for an Ace and playing a straight. Unfortunately, I had the Phoenix and could satisfy that wish. Next, John wish for a four out of me. And then John wished for an Ace out of me. Sigh… We seem to be regressing here…

Elasund

We started out this game day with six people. So we split into two groups of three. Mike suggested Java. And I nominated Elasund. Yeah, I know Ed and Susan might revoke my meaty card, but I was in the mood for settlers!

I like this settlers. It is different enough from the other settlers games to justify itself as a stand-alone game. And it has a nasty bite to it. You see, your buildings which you built are not safe. People can build over them if they play correctly and there is space around your building. Jon was in a tough position. The dice were not going his way (no big surprise there. Someone always gets hosed in settlers games). And Francesca and myself were attacking his buildings. Towards the end of the game, his hope was to save enough money to build three church pieces for the win. But I was able to build a medium sized building on a double-windmill spot to place two cubes for the win!

Carcassonne

Next up, was Carcassonne. Which I haven’t played in a while. I was burned out for quite a long time when I played it a lot in Russcon. But it made it back on the table. And this time Francesca dominated in the game. She was able to score many large cities for the win.

Masons

Finishing out the night was a quick game of Masons. I like Colovini games and their abstract feel. However, this game is a little bit too reliant on the luck of the card draw. I was able to get good cards for most of the game. But Adam was able to score more than I during the end game. My three choices were not that great. Peter and Francesca did not have that good of luck in drawing cards either.

I think that perhaps instead of discarding one card and drawing two during a scoring round. You should be able to draw four. You are already giving up on a lot of points (anywhere from 6 to 20 or more points other people can score in a round). I think that drawing two cards is not enough of a compensation for missing out on a scoring opportunity. The other option would be to start off with more cards in your hand (instead of 6).

Other games played:

Java

Titan

Tim had gaming during the Labor day weekend. There were the most number of people there that I have ever seen at Tim’s! We started out with this classic dice fest. We even had two games of it going. I was with Marty, Mary, and Scott. I started out okay. Better than Scott, who was having terrible rolls.

And speaking of good rolls, look at my roll! My Cyclops obliterated two Centaurs!!!! He needed sixes to hit and boy did I ever roll them. Six of them! Marty was having correspondingly bad luck. His monsters could not hit worth a damn and I was able to hurt him by killing his Wyvern. He had to leave after that. And a little later, Mary’s Titan attacked one of my stacks. I was defending in the Jungle and I was able to keep two Behemoths alive to summon a Serpent. It was enough to give me the edge and I was able to kill her Titan for the win. Fun game…

Can’t Stop

Kevin and Deborah showed up which surprised me. They live in Houston and drove up here for gaming. It was fun to chat with Kevin and catch up. We played another dice fest. Little thought required. Just play, have fun, and socialize…

We went to have lunch at Extreme Pizza since it is on the way to Tim’s house. He was having gaming during this Labor day weekend. We finished a little early, so I whipped out the tichu deck!

I was partnered with John. And he called Tichu. I had this hand (I was passed the dog and a four luckily enough). And he made it!

Klunker

Yea, I finally got to play this game. It had been out on the table for a while now. It is a light filler game of set collecting. However, if you have more than one set at a time when you are collecting, you receive less money. You also put cards in your store front in order to tempt someone to buy it and give you a dollar. The person with the most money when the game ends will win.

It is a simple enough game and I was lucky enough to be able to collect sets without any contamination.

Tempus

Another playing of Tempus and I am starting to suspect that there are a couple of things that unbalance this game. The first is the Religion card. This card allows you to convert one enemy token to one of yours. It is unbalanced because you spend one action to have babies and (usually) one action to move that token. Now, on some other person’s turn, they play the Religion card which does not cost them an action. This essentially gives them a free baby and movement where you lost two actions. You can then be attacked now that you are unexpectedly weakened. Not fun.

The second problem is the turtle strategy. If you have three stacks or less, you cannot be attacked (however, you can do the attacking). Someone who uses this wisely, will build up many cities and then turtle down to three stacks. This will make them invulernable. Fortunately, having 3 or less stacks usually makes you weaker in the game. It was discussed on the geek here.

Tichu

Our team was having all the luck. Although I did learn thing. If your partner passes you the Mahjong, then they usually want you to play it singly and to wish for the (usually) low card that you pass the person on your left. Jon passed me the Mahjong and I used it to increase my straight (from 2-6 to 1-6). Unfortunately, Jon did not get a chance to take the lead even though he had a Tichu hand. Next time…

I was able to finally record a full game! But it was not without problems. In trying to recover from missing pictures, I felt like a CSI detective. For example,

I did not take a picture of when John played a pair of sixes. Fortunately, my hand was visible in some of those pictures. And, since I was the last player out, I was able to figure out that John played the red six and the green six.

Jon plays a straight incorrectly. Usually we (Adam) catch this, but not this time. I notice that I can only account for 13 of Jon’s 14 cards that he played.

However, when Adam was the last player out, he showed his hand to us when I was taking the picture. And I was able to figure out that the missing card was the black six. That card should have been in the straight but Jon must have played it later.

F.B.I.

I keep Klunker on my table because I would like to play it. And tonight seemed like the night. We were looking for a quick game to start off with and I thought that game would it. But John hosed me by bringing FBI to the table. Since I didn’t know the rules to Klunker and John knew the rules to FBI, everyone agreed to play it. Sigh.

The game has a Take 6 feel to it. There are plus and minus cards in the game in five suits (colors). Every round, we will deal out ten of them. Next, people will either advance a card or not. (You can get rid of negative cards but this will cause you to go later rather than earlier). This will determine the order of play for the round. Then everyone picks to cards and simultaneously reveals them. These cards will determine which suit you must choose from. The first player reveals one of the face down cards and picks a card in the middle of the table in that suit. Play continues in the order determined until the last player goes. That person gets to take two cards. And then play goes in reverse order until the first player gets their last card.

So, you usually try to give up a high valued card in order to go first. This will atleast allow you to be guaranteed of getting one good card. The second one is a crap shoot. Unless you are lucky enough to have a pile that has no negative cards in it out there. Then you can choose that suit and not be disapointed if it is empty when it gets back to you.

At the end of the game, we determine who got majorities in the different suites for bonus cards (from +5 to +1). And your score is the total of the cards and any bonus cards.

Canal Mania

I am on Boulder Game’s mailing list. And when I received one of their notes, I noticed that they had Canal Mania coming soon at a pretty good price. So I jumped on it. And got the game quicker than Ed and Susan did (they pre-ordered directly through the publisher’s site).

This game is a mix of Ticket to Ride and Age of Steam. You build canal segments on the map. There are four kinds of segments (stretch, lock, aqueduct, and tunnel) and the restriction is that you cannot have two of the same kinds of segments next to each other. During the game, you can either collect cards that are displayed face up, or build canals. When you build, you play the appropriate cards (some are harder to build and require more cards: like the aqueduct (2 aqueduct cards) or the tunnel (3 tunnel cards)) and then score points (not much though: 0,1,2, or 3 points per tile). There are engineers in the game that will lend you their special powers (draw one more card, build with one less card, etc).

The other aspect of this game is the delivery of goods. You may deliver goods from one city or town to another. Goods must move along canals and cannot move into a color more than once (for a maximum of 6). Points are scored for cities that are connected by player’s canals. So, along a three town path connected by two players, both players will score 2.

The production value is pretty good (although the cards could be coated). And, instead of the usual tea-towel board, The Ragnar Brothers went with a cardboard board (yea! much nicer). I would rate this game as a middle weight, meaty game. And one that I hope to play again…

Today was not a good day for travelling. I went home early to avoid the rush hour (working at home is just so easy and convienent). I stop by the bank to deposit a check and come across this mess. An eighteen-wheeler overturned when it tried to do a U-turn. 79 was blocked off. But, fortunately, I was able to weave around and still access the bank.

Doug later tells me that 620 was shutdown west of IH-35 because of a gas main rupture. So we figure that Peter and Francesca were not coming. And on the next day, I read that there was an accident on IH-35 southbound caused by the stupid rubberneckers trying to look at the first accident. They really should erect large tents to cover these things up…

Tichu

While we were waiting for Peter and Francesca to show up, we played some hands of Tichu. Later, we figured that they were unable to make it here and finished out the game. And what a long and close game it was! Our heroic team only lost by 100 points! Thats a Tichu call! Newbies John and Doug increased their abilities this game by making Tichu calls. John even over Tichus Doug’s Tichu call. Getting agressive there, John. Way to go…

In the above picture, my partner calls Tichu before the pass? Um, huh? What cards you holding there, Doug? I pass my Dragon, and Doug makes it! Cool beans.

Tempus

Another playing of Tempus. And this time, we corrected two big rules problems from the last game. The first was that cities cannot be built on mountains (we got that right) and they cannot be built next to another city. This creates a Settlers of Catan type of restriction. And really narrows down the real estate of valid locations. The other problem was that Government does not give you a free action. It only allows you to pass or combine two turns. This makes that card less powerful. It was only played once during the game.

In the first round, I has one farm land with two pieces on it. Everyone else had more than me. So I chose the “have ideas” action and drew a farm backed education card (+2 to farmlands! how lucky!). This allowed me to pip Adam, much to his disappointment (its a rare card after all). John was agressive as usual. I was leaving everyone alone until I introduced Doug to the religion card. Of course, I knew Doug was going to retaliate. Fortunately, I had enough defense cards to stop his first attack. And when he was gathering forces for another attack, I went back down to three stacks which made me untouchable. I had built enough cities by now. Since I knew city spots were scarce, I made an effort to secure them. I built a city before John could when his stack was right next to mine. And I moved one of my three stacks by ship to one of the last spots on the board.

When the game ended, I was able to secure flight (+3 victory points). Unfortunately, I was not able to build one city. And I was left with my four city. Also, I could not spread out to secure some more points because many of Doug’s pieces were sitting next to my cities and I knew he would attack them since he had nothing better to do. Adam was able to win by three…

Tempus

Ahh, Tempus, the highly-awaited and long-delayed Martin Wallace game. Mike and myself placed an order at Thought Hammer, but the order arrived too late to play it at Ed’s (it probably arrived when we were playing another copy of it). Fortunately, John ordered it from Boards and Bits. They shipped it to him on Friday.

I would think that with all of the delays that this game has suffered, there would be no production problems. We had to spend some time trying to figure out what areas the table on the board was refering to. Hills, Grasslands, and Farmlands look different on the board and cards than the on tiles. It seems like two sets (with different resolutions) were used. Also, in dim lighting, it is hard to tell the difference between the black and purple pieces. I will give credit to the rules and player aid sheets, though.

You can tell by the board, above, that purple and yellow have a huge advantage. And, unsurprisingly, purple won the game. I, being lite blue, expanded out a little to the grasslands that would be contested between myself and red. During the game, I forego drawing cards and this hurt me. You see, cards give you technoligcal abilities (ignore stacking limits, extra babies, extra movement, etc) or attack/defense bonuses. So, John opened up hostilities by playing a religion card on me (damn you religion!) which removed one of my tokens (a solitary one on the grasslands) and gave him a token. Later on, he then attacked me. Since I didn’t have any cards, there was nothing that I could do. This took me out of the running for the game. So I decided to fight back. However, there is a rule that if a player has only three stacks of tokens, then he cannot be attacked! Since he never grew beyond three, he was untouchable. Seems pretty one-sided to me…

Indonesia

There is not many meaty players at Ed’s game sessions. So when we suggested another meaty game, we had trouble filling it. Fortunately, Adam joined us which gave us enough for a three player game. In this game, my shipping line was useless, there always seemed to be competing line during the game. So I didn’t make that much money with it. Adam proved to be the master of spicy-rice and shipped a lot of it during the game. Which gave him enough money to win it. I was worried that Mike would surpass me in the end. Adam kept prefering Mike’s ships to mine and would always give him more money than me. But fortunately, I kept my lead over him in the end.

Ed and Susan won Cleopatra and the Society of Architects at Gulf Games recently, and brought it out. It is full of plastic bits and looks interesting. Notice how the wide aperature of f/2.8 gives a razor-thin depth of field to this picture…

Kaivai

Yeah, another playing of Kaivai for me. Unfortunately, we got a rule wrong. For some reason, this game seems to cause that. Perhaps its the rules translation, or the structure of the rules, or perhaps its just me. Anyways, this game needs a good player aid!

Both Peter and I started out with two ships. Doug started out with one ship and a Gods Shrine. Doug didn’t build another ship for a couple of turns and was feeling the pain of not having two ships in play. And he constantly reminded us of it…

I started in last but jumped out in first and never looked back. I knew I needed to keep a supply of influence tokens both for final scoring and just having the ability to perform more actions.

Thankfully Doug said he would play it again soon (perhaps even next week). With the rules fresh in his mind and a learning game accomplished. He is ready to play a real game of it…

Ra

Another playing of this great Knizia game, Ra. Unfortunately, my tile set was not the best. I like a low tile (like the 1 or 2) and high tiles. The 1 is great where there are only a couple of tiles on the board. And the tiles contain a good tile like a Pharoah or Civilization. Call Ra and for people to bid higher or be happy for getting a tile for cheap.

Antike

Tonight was Smart-Mike’s last day in Austin. He is on a quest to become smarter by going back to CMU for some amount of years. I wish him luck in his endeavour. Too bad he is leaving, Tichu will become harder to play…

We started out with Antike. We had six people which is a good number for Antike. Everyone knew the rules and played quickly… well, everyone but Smart-Mike who did a lot of Ashley-Rollmaning…

I was pretty much left alone during the game. At one point, John decided to attack one of my cities. He was getting squeezed by Mike, Adam, and Marty. So he decided to venture into my territory. Unfortunately, he did not have quite enough to take over the city he wanted. I spent a while kicking him back out.

Mike was agressive and took a risky expansion strategy which paid off for him at the end. He was able to win the game. We did a new rules variation where if you have researched all of the technology, you can get a victory point (choose from any card). Chapel was mean and took the card I was going after… hehe… oh well.

Credit Mobilier

Mike Chapel brought a new game for us to try out called Credit Mobilier. The production values are pretty low and look like pre-schoolers designed and built it. It is a somewhat quick dice game about trying to make money by moving goods from one side of the board to the other. The fatal flaw in this game is the five dice. These dice determine what actions you are allowed. If you roll horribly, you are hosed. And if you continue to roll badly, you really hate playing this game. There is a general fund (colored purple) and 4 company funds (colored red, blue, green, and yellow). For each share that you purchase, you get payed off a dollar from the company coffers. Due to the setup of the board, some shares look more promising than others, so you try and purchase their shares. But you must roll the color of the company on one of the five dice. Are you starting to see the dice problem? When you build track (again having rolled the color) or move goods along a track (rolled of course), money is deposited into the different company coffers. If you are lucky enough to own shares in a company, you will want to initiate a payout. But you have to roll the color of the company AND an orange color (adding to the general rolling problems).

I don’t think that I would recommend this game to anyone. But I thank Mike for having taken one for the team and purchasing this game for me to try out…