I was reading the rules to Fiji, but had to take a break. For it was flea
market time. What a madhouse! I did buy Goldbräu but had to leave
since the mad press of people was getting to me…
The first of the new Friese games that I played was Fiji. It is a quick and
light filler game that uses simultaneous reveal as its mechanics. There are
four rounds of the following:
-
Distribute beads: Everyone gets 5 green, 4 red, 3 yellow, and 2 blue beads.
Put the same amount in the center of the board. -
Determine exchange conditions: There will be four groups of two cards. The
first card says what the goal is. The second card is the action that is taken
if the goal is fulfilled. A goal can be the most of one or more colors or
the least of one or more colors. The action can be to take some number of
gems (varies based on the color), or half rounded down of a color, or everyone
else but you takes one, or some funky actions like mess with the ranking
of colors or take back what gems that you showed. -
Determine goal conditions: There are four cards (one for each color). The
card will say if you are going for the most or the fewest of a color. Remember
that when you shuffle these cards, suffle their orientations as well! The
order of the cards determine tie breakers. The color on the leftmost is the
one that you are going for with ties broken by the next leftmost. -
The exchange: There are three rounds of exchanging. Players simultaneously
pick from one to four beads and place them in their hand. They are revealed
and we will check the four conditions one at a time. The trick here is that
if players are tied for the most/least of something, then the next place
person wins. If everyone is tied, then noone wins. -
Distribute shrunken heads: The first place player will get a number of heads
totalling the number of people in the game minus one. The second player will
get one less. And so on…
All in all, it was a light game. You must like the simultaneous revealing
of gems part because you do a lot of it. Of course, it sucks to have your
count be duplicated by people for one or more goal conditions and therefore
be nullified.
I was happy when Kevin was carrying around Perikles and wanted to play it.
We found four other people and started explaining the game. Unfortunately
for me, it was right around 1pm when we finished the first round of the game.
I was hungry for lunch and wanted to run down to get something to go. Sadly,
no one else wanted to do that so they used that opportunity to stop playing
the game. So not much to report here as I need a full playing of it. Gah!
Too bad my gaming group is anti-Wallace.
I went to lunch with Kevin, Debra, Kevin, Tim, Mary, and Marty. During
lunch, the topic of which show had the most spinoffs. Both Happy Days and
Cheers were discussed. Of course, there was massive verification as
three people in this picture web surfed on their PDAs. Such geeks…
Another playing of Imperial. And this time I knew what I was doing and I was
France. I was able to build up her forces rather nicely. Which painted a
hugh bulls-eye on me. One of the interesting things about this is that there
are two ways people can resolve this. They can either beat the country down
by taking back the territory and destroying the armies/navies. Or, they
can just buy shares in that country. If they go the shares route, then
they can either go for a minority holding in your country and let you run
things because you know what you are doing. Or, they can go for a hostile
takeover and do something else with the country. Interesting.