John invited me over for some Thanksgiving dinner (and some gaming). I knew that he liked two player, abstract, wooden games. So I brought over some which I have bought but never played. The first game that we picked was Complica. It is a slightly meatier version of Connect-4. Players shove their pieces into one side of the board trying to connect four in a row (horizontal, vertical, or diagonal). You can place the piece in any of the four rows except for the row where your opponent has placed. The only exceptions to this rule is when there are three contiguous pieces of your opponent’s in a row or if there is no other free row left.
A short and simple game.
The second game is played on a 5 x 5 grid with 5 different colored sets of five pieces. You start out with one of each color and the rest are placed in the middle. You place a piece on an empty spot and pick up any remaining piece. Play continues until every piece has been placed. The score is based on triangle numbers (1, 3, 6, 10) for connected pieces of a color. You are trying to connect pieces in rows and your opponent is trying to connect pieces in columns.
Another short and simple game.
For the last of the series, we played Catena. This game uses a majority scoring based on spots in a column. The columns are arranged in a diamond. Spots are filled one at a time. For each location, players simultaneously reveal one of a set of numbered tokens (0 – 10, *). The higher number wins the battle with the exception that a 1 will always beat a 10. The * always looses but you get to replace one of your already played pieces with that one. In the case of a tie, you choose again. If still tied, then the spot is replaced with a neutral piece. After all of the pieces have been filled, the majority in a column gets one victory point (ties broken by the sum of the numbers).
Here, John’s un-crated son, Clint, poses for a picture.
The last game was Aqua Romana. Which was a game where you build aqueducts and score them based on their length. Kinda like the Tron lightcycle game but set in old-school Rome. One of the interesting bits about this game is that only one player can occupy a spot on the victory track. So when someone scores an 11 long aqueduct, another person scoring an 11 long aqueduct would score the next empty spot further back along the board (with two spots available on 7 and 3).