inconsequential ruminations

A couple of weeks ago my friend James came over. He is not scared of thinking hard, so we played a quick game of Branches, Twigs and Thorns. This is a nice simple-to-learn abstract game using Icehouse pieces and a chessboard. The four-player game uses a full board; the two-player game uses a half board. You also need some small tokens. We used my childhood collection of ½p coins.

This is an occupation game, like Go, but shallower. Its alternative name is Barsoomite Go. A root square is selected on the board to start and players take it in turns laying their icehouse pieces on the board sideways, emanating from the root, until the board is full. At some point in the game, your roots run out of room to grow and you have to lay your roots out of your opponent’s roots. You are penalised, more if your new shoot piece is larger and more if the root laid out from is large. You have to lay down your pieces enclosing areas and trying to crowd your opponent. I found it fascinating.

You can play Branches, Twigs and Thorns at Super Duper Games. There is even an AI opponent.

I suspect Branches, Twigs and Thorns plays better with two. I saw a reference to Sprawl at the Geek, which might be a better multiplayer option. You can also play this at Super Duper Games.

James won the first game easily and looked to be winning the second, but somehow I smothered him at the end, more by luck than judgement, and managed to tie the evening.

8/10

The latest version of Modern Art is gorgeous. I got a price from the Brazilian publisher – $50.

I’m still tempted…

Three of us played Fury of Dracula last night. I have to say I enjoyed myself very much. It plays brilliantly with three players. Although it is a collaborative game, I did not feel like I was playing a soulless AI unlike my experience with the The Lord of the Rings (of course that’s probably thematically correct for LOTR - but that’s for another blog post). At one point, we were hot on Drac’s tail, but he melted out of our grasp and that felt thematically perfect.

The components are as gorgeous and usable as you would expect from a Fantasy Flight game.

Rick Heli liked it, but was not keen on the length. We played for three hours including rules explanations, which felt fine.

We missed the rule about the clock stopping when Dracula is at sea, but otherwise the rules were intuitive and we felt no need for extra player aids. The rules explanation felt almost effortless. We just started playing and understood it. The latest Essen releases should take note.

I doubt it will hold my attention for long, but I would love to be proved wrong.

7/10

Lewis Pulsipher just mentioned that he has a shorter, no-dice variant for Britannia. We emailed each other a while ago, after I commented on his blog, and he mentioned this. Apparently it cuts the length by a third, which would be a major bonus.

I hope it gets published, as I have no desire to play a full-length version of Britannia again. It should be cheap, so a no-brainer for Britannia fans.

Update
He has posted a session report of the variant at the Geek.

I just rounded out my Wizard Kings collection taking advantage of two offers from Columbia Games. There is free postage this week and a clearance sale on 1st edition Wizard Kings. This meant I picked up five maps and two armies for £20 – including postage to the UK.

I expect the second edition will be quite different, but I doubt that I will get it, now I have a full set of the first.

Three of us played Conquest of the Empire II on Saturday. I enjoyed myself, but it was an intense experience. Playing a confrontational game with two hypercompetitive programmers is not a recipe for a relaxed evening’s gaming.

It is a good game, but the rules are far too vague. We got five rules wrong:

1. Leaders can move with Barbarian at the Gates cards.
2. Allied troops never retreat from a combat, but stay in their original province.
3. Chaos points are cumulative. They are not discarded at the end of every campaign season. This makes Special Taxes more expensive and cities less valuable than we played them. This was our biggest mistake.
4. There should have been two auctions per campaign season – one for the first two positions and another for the third. (Seems like a waste of time with three players, but there you go.)
5. You cannot convert the influence token of an ally, even if he has no defenders in the province.

It is not really a complicated game, but it is unintuitive, so a few of these problems are understandable. The problem is that there are more than a few. At the time of writing, there are 81 threads in the Rules folder for this game at the Geek and 303 threads at the Eagle Games forums.

I found this so frustrating I trawled through both folders and put together an extended, revised FAQ. I hope the Eagle guys review and approve it, but in the meantime this should be useful to a lot of people.