Balam

Last night, Mike told me to try out Balam. He had liked it. So, when I saw
it in the library, I checked it out. And for the first thing today, I sat
down and started puzzling out the rules. Luckily, two people came by and I
convinced them to play the game. There were English rules, but the translation
was really, really, bad. It lead to a lot of confusion. But we persevered
and finally figured out how the game play went.

The first city that I built was simple (two villages and a palace). The
next city was placed on a 4 spot obsidian tile and built two villages and
two garrisons. This immediately caused a reaction as the other players
scrambled to build garrisons as well. I was not going to provoke a fight
yet. However, Nightmare
decided to attack me. I was a little suspicious when she picked me and
not her boyfriend. But I could see that my city was undefended and his
was not. She rolled a two and got to destroy my palace. I realized that
this effectively took me out of the game since I could not move the goods
that are produced into my king’s personal finances. Which meant that I
could not build buildings anymore.

So, after we had discussed this all out, I retaliated and picked one of
her undefended cities and rolled a 3. This destroyed her palace and a
village. Two people out of the game on turn 3. And upon a reread of the
rules, I notice that we missed the “Leniency of Chaak” bit where we get
two more corn goods on each round before the Eclipse.

We decided to call the game at that point. I was happy that I played it
though. That play certinally took it off of my buy list. Because I have
heard that the bad events are really nasty in this game. Maybe it just
needs the proper mindset from the start to plan for catastrophies or
wars to turn it into a better experience.

Mu

We tried a hand of Control Nut and then moved to the game of Mu. Marty went
out looking for a fifth and found Lewis. So we taught the game to him. I was
successful in my powers of suckup. He picked me twice as a partner because
of the cards that I was displaying. Unfortunately for us, we failed our goal.
I was also more agressive in bidding in this game. I made one goal and lost
another (to Gravitt of all people ;).

Minor regrets:

• Not playing more new Essen games. My main goal of this con was to check out
  all of the releases and determine if I should buy them.
• Some new Essen games had no English rules translations yet.
• Not playing a full game of Tichu at all! WTF?
• Being burned by the camera flash. Apparently, it was not having enough
  power to recharge the flash. But it had enough power to keep the display on
  and make the capacitor whining noise. Which made me think that it was on but
  not working for some unknown reason.
• Not playing disc golf in Dallas or in Waco on the trip up or back. No biggie…

Interesting facts:

• I only checked out two games out of the library (Fiji and Balam) and I didn’t
  bring any games from home to the con.

Still, it was a blast.

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…

Fiji

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.

Perikles

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…

Imperial

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.