A minimalist blog, with a pretentious title, about strategy board games.
I was just idly browsing eBay and bought Can’t Stop on a whim. It cost me £10 including postage, from a lady in Essex. It’s mostly only available from the US, so I jumped at the chance to get it from Britain.
There used to be lots of session reports about this one on Spielfrieks, but they have dried up completely. I don’t normally enjoy games as simple as this, but the guys loved Jungle Speed, so this might be a success too.
My friend Julian and I love Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective and West End Adventures so much that we decided to buy the full family of Sleuth games (except the Jack the Ripper chase game) between us. They are all out of print, but they are still available from Chessex if you email them directly. We have bought:
Including surface mail, that comes to £37.
We also bought Gumshoe over eBay for £12.50, including postage. It looks superb. There are maps of San Fransisco, newspaper clippings, autopsy reports, fingerprint records, mugshots etc etc.
These games are great, they are reasonably priced and we don’t want them to go out of stock and have to hunt for them all on eBay.
I spent Saturday at my friend Michael’s house. There were five of us for three games. It was a beautiful sunny day, so I felt bad about staying indoors, but the company, games and food were good, so I’m not complaining.
Pirate’s Cove
I have wanted to play this ever since Bruno Faidutti made this one of his games of the year. It’s probably the best looking game I have ever played. It’s a light and fun. There is some skill, but it comes from playing the games a few times, rather than deep thought. The secret action selection reminds me of Citadels. Maybe that’s why Bruno likes it so much? If I only bought games for my friends and not myself, I’d buy it like a shot. However I buy games primarily for me, so I’ll just advise them to buy it instead.
Mare Nostrum
I can understand why people were so disappointed with this. When we set it up I felt very optimistic. It has beautifully illustrated cards and board, with quality wood pieces. The first few turns matched this impression. The game flows nicely and there is resource gathering and political manoeuvring. The theme matches the gameplay, although of course it’s historically inaccurate.
Unfortunately, due to our inexperience we played for over three and a half hours without a winner. The problem is that it’s difficult to achieve the victory conditions. If you do not understand how to take advantage of trading or other players pounce continually on the leading player, it gets very difficult to win.
Eventually one player even gave up on winning and did not play optimal moves, so the game would end quicker.
Rather than play for another half an hour, we decided on the winner, because although two of us were assured to reach the victory conditions next turn, the winner would be the person who built first. A third player would have decided this, the political leader, and he told us whom he would vote for. This was a disappointing end to a frustrating game.
Merchants of Amsterdam
After all the tension of Mare Nostrum, it was my choice of game and I felt we needed something a bit less adversarial to lighten the mood. When I got back into gaming, in 2000, there was quite a bit written about this, but since then it has faded away. It’s a standard auction/area majorities game, but with the twist that it is a Dutch auction. This means that the auction starts high and a clock counts down the price. The first player to press the top of the clock pays the price on the clock. In the end the winner won by bidding consistently lower than the rest of us. This goes against my typical experience of auction games where the winner is the person who bids high at the start of the game and reaps large rewards later. I found this a satisfying change. It’s a fun, uninspiring, well-balanced game. It’s let down by very bland components. I’m glad I tried it, but I will not buy it.
Michael lent me four games, which removes most of my lust for buying new ones:
The inimitable Andy Daglish at Discount German Games, has shown me his list of surplus games he is trying to shift. Should I buy any of these? I already have opinions on some.
Thanks to The Austin Boardgamer, there’s now an Internet Relay Chat room devoted to Spielfrieks.
I’m not really into IRC, or internet chat in general, but I think it would be nice to have somewhere to go when I need a quick answer or opinion.
To set yourself up, check out Visual IRC or XChat. Then go to one of the Efnet servers and join #spielfrieks.
Zendo
Our first attempt of this was a disaster. A couple of the guys were intimidated and moaned loudly all the way through the rules explanation and effectively refused to play. I have not given up with it. I’ll try it another time with the guys who seemed interested.
Jungle Speed
This was a triumph. It certainly fitted the evening’s rowdy mood. It is basically multiplayer Snap, but everyone has separate piles of cards and you grab a stick, instead of slapping cards. Matching cards is difficult as the shapes on the cards are deceptively similar and there are some special cards that add some variety into the mix. Raucous fun. I got it due to Bruno Faidutti’s review. He is the best at spotting simple fun games. I only own three British-produced games: Hare and Tortoise, Kensington and this. Try to make people cut their nails before playing, or there will be bad scratches. We’ll have to try Pit soon.
Bohnanza
The rest of the guys enjoyed this one far more than me. It’s just too basic. I don’t feel like I’m using my brain at all. I can forgive Jungle Speed for being brainless, but not a card game that lasts an hour. How can the box say it is for ages 12+? It is on my trade pile.
I recently read two well-written articles: