Game Day 10/04/2007

Game #1

Double or Nothing

We started out the night with a light and easy Knizia game. It is somewhat reminiscent of Cloud 9. But for some reason, the initial impression was that you really didn’t push your luck as much as you did in Cloud 9. But I will not diss the master yet.

Game #2

Khronos

John brought out his new game (although Chapel said that he played it during the last BGG.CON). Unfortunately, the rules were written in a confusing manor. Both in the overall explanation/rules flow and wordage. For example, “Rule of Dominion”, “Rule of Hierarchy”, and “Temporal Paradox”. But we eventually figured it out.

The first thing that I noticed was the lack of a buffer in this game. You have a hand size of four cards. And you can build at most four cards. You are dependent on what cards you are dealt. But certain cards are better than others. Also, you can only concentrate on two of three boards. So you have to make long term choices.

Building medium and large buildings propagate in time. Which means that they are also placed on the second and third boards. You can take a chance and build in the second board for more victory points. But the trade-off is that the buildings can be destroyed by building in the first board. Which make the orange cards the safest to build.

Also, what is interesting is that Orange buildings score on the first board and purple buildings score on the second board. Since the medium and large buildings mirror across the boards, you see the same layout. One person will be the orange majority in the first board and another person can be the purple majority in the second board.

At first, this game looked like a three-dimensional version of Tigris & Euphrates. But, given the restrictive hand size, given the fact that you have to pay two victory points to re-draw cards, and given the fact that you cannot keep cards for later turns, turns this into a very tactical game rather than a strategic game. And I don’t know if it is a good tactical game.