Age of Steam – Japan

For the first game, Age of Steam looked like a likely candidate. Some one
had set it up and was willing to play. Little did I know that he has played
in a lot of tournaments and had designed this map. But I wanted to get more
AOS experience under my belt, so I was game to try it out.

This map introduces a couple of new features. The first is building over
water. This is more costly than over mountains (costs 6 dollars) and can
only be built over one water section. The second is water/land hexes. When
you build on these, there are two cases. If the next tile is land, then the
tile acts like a river, otherwise it acts like a water hex. The last new
feature is the engineer action is a temporary +1 link ability. This allows
you to deliver length 7 goods for one turn if you engine capacity is at six.

The map is very tight. I passed the first auction and built off by myself.
When the game was 2/3rds over, I finally broke even. Dakarp was probably
hurt by building next to rri1 (the designer). So, the game turned out into
a pretty obvious first (rri1 – ending in the 100s), second (me), and third
(dakarp).

Imperial

Eggert Spiele’s new game is called Imperial. I have learned that the game has
been in development for years now and was actually the precursor to Antike.
People who have played Antike will recognize a lot of similiarity to Antike.
A roundel determines what action is performed. You can move three spaces
for free and optionally pay to move up to three more. The actions are as
follows:

• Maneuver – move ships and armies. You can convoy armies across ships.
  Armies and ships can occupy neutral territorys to gain income. Or they
  can attack other country’s troops or factories.
• Investor – causes a payout to shareholders from the countries bank.
  The investor marker moves around.
• Import
• Production – All factories may produce their corresponding units.
• Taxation – generates income to the country’s bank and may give you money.
• Factory – the country pays five million to create a factory (either an
  army or naval factory).

What is different in this game is that you are an investor in countries.
If you own the most shares in a country, then you determine its actions
when the country’s turn comes up. Shares have a cost to purchase, a
percentage of interest that you receive when the investor action is taken,
and a victory point total. The score track on the board acts like Antike.
When one country reaches 25, then the game is over. This track is also
broken up into sections. These sections tell you what multiplier to use
against the corresponding country shares. It starts out with a x0 and goes
up to a x5 for the 25 spot. So if United Kingdom won and I had a 6 million
share in it, then my victory points would be 5×3 since that share has a 3

In the game, I was hosed early. I sent one fleet out into the Mediterranean
sea. I had wanted to use that ship to move my armies into Africa. However,
France decided to attack me and remove the ship instead of peacefully
coexisting. This forced me to then spend turns building up my armies
and attacking France back to get controll that I needed. This pissed off
France (the person playing it) because he was not in the lead and he
wanted my to attack the leader. I just needed to increase Italy’s presence
to get more money. Since having money allows you to buy shares in the
countries that are winning.

Still, it is a cool game and one that I will definately buy.

Hermagor

Mike checked this game out of the library because it is another new
Essen game where we had English rules for it. We only got to play a couple
of rounds for it since I needed to head off for dinner soon. The Texas Hold-Em
tournament would be immediately after dinner.

This game is like Thurn und Taxis. But the new thing that it brings to the
table is the process to determine which tiles you receive. On the lower left
section of the board is a grid. You can place pieces either on the numbered
circles or on top of the tiles. To place a piece, you pay the price in the
circle. If you go on top of a tile, you pay 2 dollars. After everyone has
placed all four of their pieces, we determine who receives the tiles. If a
tile is surrounded by more of your pieces than someone else’s (including being
on top of it), then you get it. Ties are broken by first being on top of the
tile, or second, having more pieces orthagonally touching the tile. After
all of the tiles have been resolved, then we determine payouts. For all of the
numbered rows and columns, a person gets the triangle point value in dollars.

The next phase is the placing of the tiles. Essentially, you move your
marker around the board while paying the cost on the paths. If you turn in
a tile for a city (which only takes one type of tile), then you place a house
down. And when an area is surrounded by houses, you get to put a marker in
the lower right section of the board. This section will give you victory
points.

In this game, poor Mike was alway hosed by me. I was sitting to his right.
And when I needed to commit my pieces to try and get certain tiles, it just
happened to be what Mike was going after. Sadly, due to the luck of the
draw for the tiles, there was really no other choice for me. I needed those
pieces for my path.

Jon and I drove up to Dallas this morning at 7 am. We stopped at Rudy’s for
some breakfast tacos and geeked out on the ride up. We arrived in Dallas at
10:30. So we wandered around town for a bit. Wouldn’t this make a great
spot for a game of Big City?

There it is, the Plaza of the Americas! The building that holds the convention.
It is a pretty nice architecture. A giant enclosed area gives a feeling of
spaciousness. See the skyway that allows travel from the Adam’s Mark to the
Plaza? Who needs to go out in the real world now?

Here it is…the tunnel into goodness…

The Red Prize tables

The Blue Prize table

Badges

People are playing before the registration even…

Oooo… Space Dealer…

New games from Essen (front)

New games from Essen (back)

The game library is in a new and bigger room.

The rare game, Big Boss, is sitting there in shrink!

And Age of Renaissance is there also in shrink!

Space Dealer

This is one of the new Eggert-Spiele games that I have been dying to try.
It is a 30 minute game with two one-minute sandtimers that perform actions
for you. You use them to produce goods, move your ship to transport goods
to other player’s locations (dropping them off for victory points), building
on to your space station, research new technology, or mining goods (generally
causing modules to function). Each card that you build has a one-time demand
of goods. When the matching goods are delivered by another person, they place
their marker on your building and they will score victory points. Usually,
you score lesser victory points as well. So it is in your best interest to
build building cards to lure people to your space station. One thing to keep
in mind is that the modules must be powered in order to function. So, it is
critical to upgrade your generators from level 1 (powering two spots) to
level 3 (powering four spots). Ships move around a round track which also
serves as the score track. There is each of the individual player’s planet
seperated by a neutral planet. For example, to move to my right hand player’s
space station, I need to spend one action to move right and arrive at a
neutral planet, spend another action to move to the next planet. Then, you
can drop off the goods to fufill victory points. It costs you nothing to
teleport back to your home planet, but you loose any undelivered goods.

The game is short, tense, and deviod of waiting on other people to
calculate their turns. You spend most of your short downtime planning
future moves. And you definately want to keep track on what other people
are mining to see if they can deliver their goods before you can.

This game is off to a great start. Now will it be a lasting game and
have enough staying power to keep it fresh and interesting? Only the sands
of time will tell…

Green Town

Mike brought us another new Essen game to try. One made by the Bambus
Spieleverlag company. I definately recognized the green box from an
earlier game of theirs: Kanaloa.
It billed itself as a 45-60 minute game. The rules were not that difficult
to figure out from the translation (there was one hiccup of determining the
order of player actions).
This game is about performing tours of the country side for victory points.
You are either building up the country side or holding a tour. At the start
of the game you can choose one of four actions: 1) tour, 2) build,
3) build OR tour, 4) build AND tour. Once you have performed an action,
you flip that marker face down (taking it out of your possible choices), and
play passes to the left. When the last player has played, they move a
“x2” marker to the person on their right and perform one extra turn. This
process continues until everyone uses all of their actions. Then, the actions
are flipped back to face up and everything repeats.
Players have one tour card in front of them. This is the goal that they are
trying to fulfil. It has the length of the hex spots that must be crossed
and the numbers of things that people want to see. These can be nature areas (trees),
culture spots (houses), sports locations (circles), and/or shopping locations
(cubes). The cards also tell you the minimum and maximum possible numbers
of each of spots. For example, you might have to perform a tour over nine
hexes that must visit at least one nature area (with a maximum of three),
two culture spots, one sports location (with a maximum of two), and one
shopping area (with a maximum of three). For each of your own buildings and
nature areas that you visit, you get a buck (a victory point). Other people’s
building pay the corresponding person. And if you do not meet the critera
of the tour, you loose dollars for each thing that was missed.
This game was simple in concept. But our group turned it into a real brain
burner. The game lasted two hours and thirty minutes! It was rather difficult
trying to figure out valid tour paths. The length of the tour was what was
killing us. It is hard to find a tour that travels exactly nine
hexes and fufils the conditions.

Iliad

Mike Chapel succumbed to call of new, shrink-wrapped games and bought one.
It was Iliad. Which was a card game about battles. What was amusing was
that Mike couldn’t handle the continued use of the term “her” where you
would normally use the sexist “his”.

The army cards represent units. And the units follow rock/paper/scissors
like rules. For example, the Archer defeats Chariots and Hoplites.
Ballista defeat Chariots and Elephants. Chariots defeat Archers and Hoplites.
Hoplites can form phalanxes where their total is the sum of the points times
the number of cards.

There are two types of rounds: Thanatos or Gorgons. For Thanatos rounds,
everyone plays cards until they pass. When you pass, you get the highest
ranking hero (from 4 down to 1). The person with the most units left on
the board (plus the hero) gets their choice of one of two victory cards.
The second place person gets the other. And the person who had the least
number will get the Thanatos card which contains a negative victory point
number. A Gorgon round is quicker in that, at the start of a person’s turn,
if they have the highest army, then they immediately win. They get one
victory card and the battle is over.

For our first Gorgon round, Jon essentially played a spoiler. I started out
with a hariot (a wall that stops chariots and has 0 value). Paul dropped out.
Mike played an elephant (x2 multiplier). Jon played an elephant. I played
a hoplite (valued 4). Mike played a hoplite on the elephant valued 3 (x2 = 6).
Jon put an archer on his elephant. Now it comes to my turn. If I play a
2 valued hoplite (4+3×2 = 6), then Mike will likely play another hoplite
on his elephant. Jon does something. I would go for more hoplites to get
my multiplier greater than Mike but then Jon would have no choice to use
that archer to stop me. This would give the victory to Mike since Jon’s
army value is so low. So, instead, I dropped out and gave the battle to
Mike. Sigh.

Tichu

We had 30 minutes to kill before we had to go and play the ultimate meaty
game of Texas De Brazil. So, Jon and myself taught newbies jridpath and John
Pastor the ultimate partner game of trick taking — Tichu. After explaining
the rules we played a couple of hands. The first hand was an uninteresting 50/50. But
on the second hand, in my first eight cards were two aces and the Dragon. So
I called Grand Tichu. In the next six were the Phoenix and my partner passed
me another Ace. Of course, the other team passed me the Dog. I had no trouble
making that hand. Hopefully, we planted the seed of Tichu in two new people.