inconsequential ruminations

I have been playing at the play-by-web site Yucata.de recently. I played there about a year ago, but it has moved on significantly.

The list of games has grown and it seems more refined. It is still an amateur site, with a couple of strange user interface quirks, but it is very fast and easy to use.

The game selection work really well for PBW too. Short and sharp games like Pente and Saint Petersburg are typical. I have gone off playing heavy games like wargames online. Getting back into the game situation every turn takes so long I find it stressful. The games at Yucata are pitched perfectly for my current tastes. Super Duper Games is another site that has games at this level, but last time I played the site was very slow.

So far I have tried:

• Capt’n W. Kidd – a game of fighting pirates maneuvering for position on a ship’s deck. You are trying to surround and crowd your opponents pawns, while moving along ropes. It has capture rules similar to Go. Not bad.
• Just 4 Fun – Go-Moku/Renju but you can only play stones when you have the right total of number cards. Too luck-dependent.
• Chinagold – Weird area control game. I did not really get to grips with it. I like abstracts with a little excitement and this has none.
• Hey! That’s My Fish! – This is the best of the bunch so far. It reminds me of Amazons, but played on hexes and capturing variable points for each move. This would be a nice Christmas gift for an eight year old.

It is a very nice site. I have donated a few Euros. Please challenge me to a game. My user name is icheyne.

To my surprise I have become slightly addicted to Warbook, a basic, but fun, Facebook-based massively multiplayer fantasy spreadsheet game (MMFSSG).

Like all these games, there is no real goal, but it is fun bashing others and being bashed. My Warbook name is inicehyena. If you want to play, please comment here and I’ll send you an invitation, getting me a referral bonus…

About this time last year, when I returned from Essen, I felt jaded and pessimistic about gaming. I had played way too many mediocre games at Essen and my weekly games nights had pretty much dried up. A year on things are really looking up. I have played plenty of inspiring games, my regular games nights are back on the road and I am even getting meatier games played with several other friends.

The Kids Of Catan

My four year old boy loves this. If he can get it down from the shelf he likes just assembling the village. It is very simple and is pure luck, but it teaches basic game-playing skills and the components are gorgeous. Far more fun than snakes and ladders.

Piccobello

This is very sweet. You take it in turns to hang up washing on a miniature washing line. It is barely a game, but the kids love it.

PitchCar

I played this once with my regular gamers and once with my boy and it was a major hit both times. I will have to get the expansions and maybe even pimp it out.

1829 Mainline

Peter and Chris came around and we had a very enjoyable afternoon with 1829 Mainline, followed by a less enjoyable evening watching the Rugby World Cup Final. This gets poor reviews from serious 18xx fans, but this Age-of-Steam-loving newbie enjoyed himself. I played 1825 by email a while ago and found it very static. This was far more fluid. 1829 ML does have problems, but they seem fixable. Chris Farrell sums it up nicely.

Age of Empires III: The Age of Discovery

I am not sure about this. For one thing the board is hideous and the other components are gaudy. Many compare it to Puerto Rico, but there is plenty of luck. I did not enjoy Puerto Rico at all the first time I played it, so I will have to give this another chance. Its BoardGameGeek rating is now a massive 8.05 and its standard deviation is an average 1.35, but the blog pundits are on the fence. Anthony Simons was disappointed, Chris Farrell hates it and Frank Branham likes the game, and never wants to play it again.

Blue Moon City

A respectable welterweight. You have to give some respect to a game that says sixty minutes on the box and comfortably finishes in that time on the first play.

Caylus Magna Carta

I prefer this to the board game. It took longer than expected to finish at two hours. This is top of my list to play again.

Dia de los Muertos

I played this again and I decided to trade it away. It is very quirky and complicated compared to the underlying depth of play. It is a shame as the cards are great.

Domaine

Easy to learn, elegant and vicious. What more do you want?

The End of the Triumvirate

This is so close to being great, it hurts, but it has one fatal flaw. Three player games, especially ones with lots of interaction, have to conquer the Petty Diplomacy problem and this one does not.

Gang of Four

Simpler than and superior to Tichu. I would like to play Ole again, my other favourite climbing game to see how it compares.

High Society

One of my favourite lightweights. It is the most intuitive auction game I have tried.

Indonesia

My favourite large-scale trading game – definitely better than Parthenon for instance. Apart from the mergers, this is actually relatively easy to learn and play. The map is difficult to use, but nowhere near as bad as the hype suggests.

Intrigue

The opposite of a cooperative game. Incredibly intense if played in the right spirit. More of a psychological experiment than a game. I felt dirty afterwards, but it is very interesting.

Notre Dame

The intricate pictures on the board and cards reflect the game play perfectly. Very dry, but very compact. A two player game with me as a newbie took thirty minutes.

Thurn and Taxis

I would rather play Ticket to Ride Marklin every time.

We the People

If you like Twilight Struggle, you will like this. Charles Vasey taught me and methodically pulled me to pieces. By the end he was toying with me, but somehow got too confident and allowed George Washington to stray into Long Island, which is a dead end. I attacked him, and as he had nowhere to run, George Washington was captured – a real upset. This sort of unpredictability is something I love about war games. They are so complex and deep that you are never entirely out of it as one missed step can lead to disaster. I would love to buy WtP, but it is out of print and copies go for crazy money. I can see how it spawned the Card Driven War Games genre. There are rumours of a reprint, but there has been no word for a while. Apparently the reprint would not use battle cards, which is controversial. I would be happy to see them go. There is little skill involved in the card play and it slows the game down. Something like Descent’s dice mechanic would be much more interesting.

Rick Heli has been looking after Spotlight on Games for 10 years. The font on the page is not great – I copied and pasted the article into notepad. 1200+ reviews is awesome.

It turns out that Chris Farrell has been playing games and writing about them since he retired from blogging in January. Here are his 2007 game comments at the Geek.

Updated with a better link from Chris.

Year after year, Bruno Faidutti’s Game of the Year showcases an interesting set of games that I have not played yet and really want to. Fire and Axe and Gift Trap both look really strong in their genres.

I have played Gloria Mundi and Canal Mania and was not overly impressed. Imperial is good and I would love to play a full game of it.

Yesterday I was summoned to visit Charles Vasey, who only lives a couple of miles from me, and we played World War 1, an SPI wargame from 1975.

Charles Vasey has designed several games and runs a wargaming fanzine called Perfidious Albion, which seems to have mutated into a mailing list. I first heard about him through one of Tom Vasel’s old Interviews with an Optimist. He is a real character – very quick and clever. He played the game at a blinding pace and was way ahead of me. If he had been playing to win he would have crushed me. His dining room is fabulous, full of cycling and history books, WWII miniatures and games.

I first heard WW1 recommended by Mark Johnson on BoardGamesToGo a couple of years ago and it is definitely as good as advertised. There are two versions, one by SPI, the version we played, and a later reprint by Decision Games. Unfortunately the reprint changed a few elements of the game, which apparently make the game worse.

World War 1 is a grand strategic view of the Great War supposedly playable in three hours. As you would expect from 1975, it is a hex and counter wargame, but it has a lot of subtleties. The rules are only eight pages long and I absorbed them in two hours. The map cuts out almost all France and concentrates instead on the battles in the East. This makes sense as the battles in France are a meat grinder stalemate, while the interesting maneuvering happens in the East.

BoardGameGeek image

The heart of the game are the Combat Resource Points (pronounced krips) of the combatant nations. These represent the strategic resources available. CRPs are used to absorb damage in combat and to buy new armies. When a nation’s CRPs are bled down to zero, they have to retreat in every combat where they take a loss. This leads to sudden crumbling of fronts. The Allies therefore are trying to dissolve the German forces in the Western Front, while the Central Powers are trying to force an early Russian collapse, which produces a major victory point advantage. It is an interesting balance and I got a great taste of the ebb and flow of the war. The landings at Gallipoli are represented neatly too. Unfortunately we ran out of time, so Ataturk was never challenged.

I really enjoyed the game. It was fascinating for me to see how the war in the East developed, as British popular history claims WW1 only took place on the Western Front, without any of those noncy French or vulgar Yanks. Realising my ignorance, I recently read The First World War by John Keegan, but I got a much more vivid feel for the conflict through this game.

My only quibble is that the game is sold at coming under three hours. Charles basically played the game for me at lightning speed, but we still ran out of time. We accidentally forgot the winter rules, which would have sped things up, but I still think that playing with my normal pals we would have fumbled through in around 4.5 hours at least for the first time.

8/10

All in all it was a great experience. Charles hinted at Squad Leader next time. Fingers crossed.