inconsequential ruminations

I was on holiday this week and I ran out of books early (An Ice-Cream War by William Boyd was unexpectedly good.) and my wife doesn’t like two-player games, so I had to think of other options. I had my Ubuntu Netbook Remix netbook, so I decided to try a few computerised boardgames from Sebastian Sohn’s SoftBoard Games geeklist. In order of amount of time played:

• Fabled Lands Application – This ebook adaptation of an advanced gamebook called Fabled Lands from the 1990s was surprisingly entertaining. The program took care of page flipping, game saves and kept track of stats, so it was more fun than reading the original books would be now. It is coded in Java, and ran without any problems. The large version of the application includes some nice fantasy art, making me nostalgic for my childhood of reading White Dwarf. I would have preferred to play Planescape Torment with GemRB, but I could not get that working, so FLApp scratched my RPG itch adequately.
• Jotto – This excellent little deductive wordgame/puzzle runs smoothly under Wine on Linux. Jotto is free and playable with paper and pencil. It definitely deserves more publicity.
• Blokus – I have played the online version at the Blokus website, but this version is much better, although the 3D graphics do not add much. There is an Ubuntu package and it ran well. I could not beat the AI, but that doesn’t say much. This should be included with Ubuntu instead of the lame games on there right now.
• Red November, Strike Force One and Homas Tour (Um Reifenbreite) – These all ran well, but I could not muster up the enthusiasm to read the rules.
• Ra and San Juan – I would have loved to play these and they ran, but they would not scale to my netbook monitor’s weird 1024×576 resolution.
• Trax and Roll Through The Ages would not run at all under Wine. I may give them a spin back in London on my Windows 7 machine, although they have to compete with Dragon Age.

Playing with the Isleworth Gamers continues to help me catch up with games I should have played years ago.

We started with Chicago Express, which was well received, although I lost badly and I’m still not sure why.

We then got in a game of Perudo. This is such a classic. I don’t understand why I haven’t played it for years. I could barely remember the rules at first, but it came back to me like riding a bicycle.

The evening’s main course was Sceptre of Zavandor. There were five of us and we played for three hours, which felt at least an hour too long. By 11:15 my head was spinning. One good thing about the game is that it starts quite slowly with simple decisions, but by the end you are having to calculate big numbers and at that time of night I wasn’t up to it.

Anyway the bottom line is that Sceptre of Zavandor was interesting, but I have played too many of these Games for Accountants recently and this one lacks the drama of Age of Steam or the brevity of Chicago Express. I wouldn’t mind trying Phoenicia, as it supposed to be similar and shorter, but the ratings are mediocre, although that may be due to poorly written rules.

That’s the last time I name-drop Brian Bankler in one of my posts! In all seriousness, I am surprised that Dungeon Lords was a flash in the pan. It’s an interesting game, but I suppose it’s a crowded market.

Game Taster is a good description. I am trying to move away from this, especially now that I’m getting regular gaming with the Isleworth Gamers. If only they would chose an interesting Game of the Month.

Up until a month ago I had not played any of Vlaada Chvátil’s games, but now I have played Through The Ages, Space Alert and Dungeon Lords. Galaxy Trucker shows up at the club often, so I dare say I’ll add that to the list in a few weeks. Chvátil’s designs are slower and more complicated than I generally like, but they are all interesting and well developed. I can see why he has such an enthusiastic following.

This week we played Dungeon Lords and had a great time. Jeff has played around twenty times and taught us well, throwing in jokes from the rules. We played for two and a half hours, but we ran through an extended tutorial and played slowly. Jeff said we could play it in 90 minutes with experience. The combat tutorial was superb. I wish more complicated games would include these as understanding the rules well made our first game much more enjoyable.

I can’t beat Andy Merritt’s description in his catalogue:

Dungeon adventure board game with an impressive array of components, including two double sided boards, and three further boards, and heaps of cards, tiles and figures. The big twist is that the players are not the adventurers, but rather the assorted shady characters who set up dungeons! This they do competitively, and sometimes it will be necessary to indulge in a little evil to get the job done properly – unfortunately the more evil used the stronger the adventurers that dungeon will attract. Ahhh, the trials of being a dark lord…

Brian Bankler and Chris Farrell have both criticised it for feeling:

a little truncated. It seems like the story wants to develop more, but, on the other hand, the game itself doesn’t want to be any longer.

Personally, I felt the game ended at the right time. You would have to simplify it too much to include more combat rounds in a reasonable time-frame.

Chris also says that:

the determinism of the combat phase is thematically odd and may make it more of a brain-burner than it wants to be.

This what makes the game great. A game with a light feel, but that still requires serious planning. The rest of the game has plenty of chaos and randomness – ruining plans entertainingly.

We played the Advanced rules. Maybe Chris and Brian were playing the Basic rules? Brian recently said this might be his top game of 2009, so he must have reconsidered.

I would not play Dungeon Lords with non-gamers, or even casual gamers, but in the right environment it is excellent. Dungeon Lords manages to be deep, intuitive and has a fun theme. I like it as least as much as Agricola, which may have more variability, but it lacks the fun. Rather like Space Alert, it’s all about seeing plans fall apart under pressure, but it’s less hectic and requires serious strategic thinking.

Jeff was so busy concentrating on teaching us, he made a few mistakes, picked up a lot of evilness and so had to draw both paladins. Ian managed to stay good, but ran out of money and food early. I thought I was going to win as I avoided any serious mistakes until the last turn, but I ran out of money and failed to get enough food, so my monsters deserted me and the last adventurers ravaged my dungeon. Final scores:

1. Ian – 13
2. Iain – 4
3. Jeff – 3

At least none of us got negative points, so we got our Dungeon Lords licences.

To start the night, we played High Society. I always enjoy this game. I think I prefer it to Money or For Sale, as it’s just as fast and strategic, while being more intuitive. Luckily we played the good-looking Uberplay version, not the ugly new Gryphon Games version.

I should point out that the Isleworth Gamers have a session reports blog. I normally post here before that is updated, so it’s not easy for me to link to the reports individually, but it’s worth subscribing in Google Reader if you like session reports.

Fluxx
This week’s games night started with a couple of hands of seven or eight player Fluxx. It’s almost a party game, but it’s way too random and silly for me. The second hand was won before all the players had a chance to take a turn. Even when I’m playing party games, I want something more skilful than this.

After Fluxx I joined in with a group of five players for the evening – Jon, Dan, Maynard and Russ.

Pick Picknic
Simple 20 minute kids game or filler. I can’t improve on Rick Heli’s summary. I didn’t realise there was a Prohibition-themed version too. The artwork is typical Doris Matthäus quality. I will pick this up for my girl when she’s a little older and she has her cousins over. For usability it would be good to replace the chicken food cubes with numbered counters.

Space Alert
I was bewildered for the first training mission, as the room was pretty noisy. I could barely hear the audio track, cleverly played from Dan’s phone, and there is quite a lot to take in at first. By the second round I was starting to get it and by the third advanced round, with the battle bots, I was starting to think strategically even though I was still useless.
I like the cooperative aspect and the planning under pressure is fun. I’d like to play this again in a quiet room with other experienced players.

China
A classic 45-minute area-control €urogame with multiple interlocking scoring mechanisms. I traded away the original version of this game, Web of Power, a few years ago and this session made me regret it a little.

The Adventurers
This ended the night and was perfect to learn after 10pm. You play a tomb raider escaping from lava and rolling boulder traps. I was the only new player, but still managed to win it, which shows what a random knockabout game it is. The components are excellent and it’s crying out for customisations, expansions and variant rules.
This was my favourite play of the night, even though it’s not necessarily the best game. Maynard deserved to win, being the only one with the nerve to memorise the lava tiles, but he got a little too greedy at the end and was squashed by the boulder with under five spaces to move.

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My daughter Hellie will be five in August, so she can now handle games for six year olds without too much prompting. Chris gave me a valuable rule of thumb for kids games, in that the age on the box is for when kids can play the game together without adults.

Chateau Roquefort

This is 6+ on the box, but Hellie struggled. It is an elaborately produced big-box game themed around teams of mice competing to find cheese in a castle using four action points per turn. The castle has sliding floors and pit traps to make it interesting, but strangely no cats. Hellie will find it easy in about six months and it will be a lot of fun sliding each others mice and the cheese away from each other. Unfortunately the box is big and it is expensive, but you get what you pay for.

Giro Galoppo

Horse racing along a short course with obstacles using a dice deck – six cards numbered from 1-6. Hellie got the hang of it and it is good for her counting.

Sac Noir (Bausack)

We played the simplest variant, Tower of Babel, where you collaborate on a tower. The person who knocks it over takes a bean and the first person to five beans loses. This was the major hit out of our recent games. Hellie got very excited about balancing towers. This will get a lot of play. I have the Sac Noir version, which is hard to get hold of. Looking at the pictures on the Geek, I might as well have got the cheaper white Bausack version.

Highly Suspect (Höchst Verdächtig)

I read about this unpronounceable game years ago in Bruno Faidutti’s review and finally picked it up at the Essen flea market. Hellie enjoyed this, but it was tough for her to see how the tilting board would move the little men. I am not sure how much longer the rocking cardboard base will survive, but I am very happy I have it as it is a very original game. This deserves a reprint – although you can find copies on German eBay.