Bora Bora, Guildhall, Straw, Grand Cru, Nieuw Amsterdam, Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas, Riff Raff, Iota, Loopin Louie

Highlight for me this week is Nieuw Amsterdam. Its a new game for me and pretty fun to play!
Lets see what exciting games I have played this week :)

Bora Bora

Game Session and Thoughts: Manage to bring this out again and with more plays, I am getting better at managing what I want and the objectives I can accomplish. For most of the games so far I will attempt to complete all 9 objectives but that kinda dictates what I will be doing as my entire game is to try to get the various requirements done to achieve my objectives. I also managed to buy 6 pieces of jewellery and quite high scoring ones to get quite a few points. I was attempting to get the max points for tattoo by activating all my men tiles at the same time but only managed to get halfway. I have been listening to Joel and Lance's podcast and they talked about bora bora as well and what Joel said is pretty true. If during the game you find yourself in the lead most of the time, it means that you maybe doing something wrong or not maximising what you can do during the game.
So far I have not seen anyone manage to place all 12 huts onto the board OR fill up with 12 man/woman tiles. I think that is one of the more difficult ones to achieve for end game scoring. It seems the "filling of the 12 spaces" as well as building 6 of the tiles onto those 12 spaces are the best objectives to obtain since its possible to achieve both end game objectives at the same time, scoring you 12 points. Second easiest will be the jewellery but that is dependant on how the setup was like. Third will be the objectives and that is quite lucrative too because if you manage to complete 9 objectives you will at least have 4x9 = 36 points but you could have 6 x 9 = 54 points.
Pet Peeves: One kinda irritating thing I have found about this game is that setup is rather tedious. I will recommend having a bag each for the objectives, man and woman tiles. This will allow setup to be pretty fast as you don't need to sort them out. Another smaller peeve is that explaining how the game works can be quite lengthy because of all the different actions available as well as Phase B sections and the end game scoring. It will require multiple plays because most new players probably won't remember what the end game scorings are until halfway through the game which will not afford them enough time to switch plans halfway and switching goals halfway in the game can be quite detrimental. Jon pointed out the issue where the game seems to dictate what you can do because of the decreasing points in latter rounds for building and increasing points for the number of priests that you have. I can understand his point of view because I also box myself in by going after the objectives and thus determine what i need to and can do to get the points. Still I guess it makes it easier to let new players understand the game and get into it and give them a fighting chance against experienced players.
Conclusion: Still highly recommended from me.


Guildhall

Game Session and Thoughts: So after last week's playing 2 player I manage to play this with 3 and 4 and I must say 3 players is probably the sweet spot for this. It gives you an extra opponent to guard against and attack and doesn't extend the game play time for too long. Also gives an opportunity to guard against the leader. 4 may cause the game to take too long to finish. Surprisingly as you play the game, even though there maybe an early leader, usually every player will start to guard and disturb the leader such that the rest can catch up. This leads to very tense and exciting last few rounds as players try to win it themselves.
Pet Peeves: Unfortunately though, usually in the last round it is a forgone conclusion who will win and probably there is nothing else for the other players to do unless the luck of the draw allows someone else to catch up. Definitely recommends it with 3 or 4 but not so with 2.
Conclusion: Still a Try before you buy. Jon hates the art lol and will want to retheme it. Suggestions anyone?


Straw

Game Session and Thoughts: Straw is a light filler card game very similar to Zeus on the Loose. In the game, players are playing cards which represent goods with a certain weight/number. If the sum of all the cards on the camel (first card in the centre of the table) exceeds 50, then that player has "broken the camel's back" and all other players will score the cards in their hand for points. However there is a special card that is the Straw which if you use it to break the camel's back (i.e when it comes to you and the sum is 50, you play that card), then only you will score points. Game lasts as many rounds as there are players and the player with the most total points will win the game. Its very similar to zeus on the loose in that you are playing cards with numbers and having a sum total that you are trying not to exceed (in this game) and trying to exceed (in Zeus on the loose). In Straw, there are only a few "special powers" like reserve play order and the magic carpets which provide negative points. For Zeus, there are god cards with special powers which adds more variety but can lengthen the game if all players are actively blocking well.
When I played this initially, I was playing all my low weight cards so as to keep all the high weight cards but I quickly found that this was not very good as well because nearer the end when the weight is almost to 50, having a few of those low weight or negative cards will help to prevent you to be the player that breaks the camel's back!
Conclusion: This game is definitely better with more players (plays 2-6) and quite a nice filler. Recommended!


Nieuw Amsterdam

Game Session and Thoughts: Saw the video review from Joel and wanted to give this a go. This is a medium weight euro game that is sort of area control and with a rather unique action-selection cum auction mechanism. In the game, players are trying to score as many points as they can and this is usually done in game by means of shipping fur or scoring for your buildings in the town area. There are quite few phases in the game but the first thing you do is auction or bid for actions. Now this is quite unique in that there are 5 slots available and at the start of a round, you will randomly place action chits onto the available slots. Some slots have space for 3 action chits, some have 2. Some slots also gives 2 coins if you win that slot. Starting with the first player, you will place your turn order chit on the slot that you are bidding for and declare a price. This is a once-only auction in that if your bid is the final bid so you will need to choose wisely. Once someone has won the auction (after each player has bid or passed once), that player then exchanges his turn order chit with the one that was placed in the slot (if he has any remaining) and the player that initiated the bid will get the turn order chit (if he/she wasn't the player that won the bid). Once all players have won 1 slot and obtained the action chits, the player will go through 3 phases which are denoted by the action chits.
The first action is a city action and in player order, players will determine a special action and if they have the action chit for that city action, take one of 2 available city actions. The order sequence between special action or city action is determined by the player. City action allows you to either build 1-3 buildings into the town area or score for town areas where you have majority or drew with other players. You will still be able to perform a special action even if you do not have a city action chit.
The second action is a land action where players can obtain land deed cards (That are not cleared in the beginning) or clear land deed cards they already possess provided the building slots of each land deed card is already filled with their buildings. By clearing, you will score points as well as obtain a number of wood pieces and get corn during the income phase. Again, players can take a special action.
Third action is the fur action where players can use the action chit to either obtain fur with goods from the market or ship their fur and obtain points (determined by how many sets of the same fur they have), coins by fulfilling the requirements of the ship cards available. These ship cards also provide Goods during the income phase.
Take note that the special action that you can play in each of the 3 action phases I just described are denoted by the various town spaces. If you have majority (more buildings than others) or drew with the others, you don't need to pay 1 coin when activating that town area's special action. Special actions include trading coins for wood or vice versa, building new warehouse to store goods etc etc.
After the action phases, players will collect income for corn (if they have cleared land cards) and pay corn for each building they have in the town area. Penalty for not being able to feed will be removal of buildings as well as 2 points for each building removed.
Players will also receive goods from any ship cards they have and finally income by counting the number of buildings they have in the town area and +1 for each area they have the majority. That will be the end of a round and at the end of 6 rounds, there will be a final scoring phase (where majority of the town areas will come into play as well as any remaining goods) and whoever has the most points will win the game.
Conclusion: As I mentioned, the auction phase is quite unique because the order in which the action chits are selected as well as bided for will determine what actions you can take during that round. Do you want to bid for the 3 action chits which allow you to perform all actions during the action rounds? Or do you want to perform a specific action twice? Do you want to win that action just to go first? In this game, going last has its advantages because during auction you can get action chits for 0 coins and at the same time you get the last action. For now at least after 1 play, I can see going first as not being all that lucrative. Interestingly, I went for the land card and majority in town area path and I did win the game but my closest competitor did not have a single building in the town area and opted to go for the fur trade instead and he wasn't too far off from my final score. So this does show that there are different paths to victory but since there are only 3 main areas of scoring, it doesn't have that much variety. Probably the most random thing in the game are what fur is available on the market as well as the action chits that will be available in the different slots. Quite a fun game for me and I will definitely want to play it again. Recommended!


Grand Cru

Game Session and Thoughts: Another wine game? Yup and this plays, for me at least, better than Vinhos. In the game, players are trying to have the most money at the end of the game. Players however, do not start with any money and must take loans to get money right during setup. Play then goes in player order and each round will last at least 4 turns but can be extended either when all players have passed or 1 player has no more cubes (denoting wine) on their vineyard tiles. During the turn, players can choose from a variety of actions from bidding on tiles that are available in the market, selling already harvested wine (cubes), bumping up the prices for a particular color of wine to harvesting a wine etc etc. Once the first phase is over, then there will be a wine festival at the end of the round. Players will score prestige points depending if they are in the majority for wine of a color sold or if they few. Then in player order, players will be able to spend these prestige points (which are accumulative between each round) to obtain certain benefits for example, an extra sale action or obtaining money etc. Once all players have passed, then players need to pay interest for the loans they have and then decide to take more loans or payoff the loan. A new round will then begin. The game ends when at least 1 player has payed off ALL his loans or if a player is bankrupt and cannot take any loans. Then player sell off all their wines they have previously harvested, score points for the different types of wine/improvement tiles they have and then whoever has the most money will win the game.
Pet Peeves: This game has horrible iconography. There aren't that many in a game where there are quite a few rules and whatever is there isn't very helpful. We had to refer to the rulebook so many many times to understand what each tile does. Also, its so difficult to find the english version of the manual and even the geek only has a no-picture only user-created manual. Gameplay though its faster to learn and play as compared to Vinhos and not as brain burning.
Conclusion: I had fun and this game shows that short term gains will often always lose to long term gains which may or may not be a good thing. There are interesting development tiles which cannot be ignored and will allow actions such as being able to harvest 2 types of wine for the price of one.  A good combination of action tiles will enable you to perform so many things that are often limited by the number of turns each round has. Not a bad game and I would say its a medium euro I will definitely want to try it again but for now it will be a Try before you Buy for me.


Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas

Game Session and Thoughts: The game with a very difficult to pronounce name lol. Its a palingdrom btw and you can google up the meaning. In the game, there are 4 books of your color spread out all over the board. You are tasked to retrieve all 4 books and the first player to do so will be the winner. During your turn, you have 6 action points with which to play cards that will rotate or move tiles that represent footpaths on the board. Each player also has a set of special power cards that provide very powerful options for example, destroying footpaths or allowing your pawn to leap over open spaces. During your turn, you also have a free action which allows you to move your pawn 1 space or rotate or move a footpath 1 space for free. After you have played your cards, you will get to move your pawn a number of spaces depending on how many of the general card (not your personal more powerful cards) you have played and then you get to draw back up to 6 cards (either from the general deck and/or from your special power cards).
I played it with 2 and even though I was leading in the beginning my opponent quickly drew level with me. With 2 players though it came down to choosing between blocking me or moving your pawn. He tried to block me a few times but in the end if he wanted to win he had to move on to grab the last book. I was very lucky with my card draws and the game was pretty much going my way most of the time. I think with 4 players it will be even more tense as if the opponents decide to gang up against the leader, the leader will have quite a hard time trying to win.
Conclusion: This game is just BEGGING to be rethemed in the style of Harry Potter! Components wise they are quite nicely done and the books are quite detailed. There is a set of initial placement cards which will help determine where the books are setup but that's all the function they serve for the entire game. That kinds seems redundant. Still this is quite a unique game and it will be a Try before you Buy for me.


Riff Raff

Game Session and Thoughts: I played this first with my usual Cult of the New gaming group and I decided to grab myself a copy to bring to the office to play. Now with my CotN group it was all quite relaxed and fun and I was goofing off since i really sucked at agility games. In office I was surprised that everyone was being all serious and positioning themselves to catch the falling items. I played again last night and an opponent even used a tactic where she purposely placed it such that items will fall and she can catch the falling pieces thus not being penalised too heavily! Trust people to try to find a way to game a party game hahaha....
The components are very nice wood grade and well done. I also found out that depending on how you setup the ship and planks etc, you can adjust the difficulty of the game and thus replayability is very high on this. Its a pity it only plays up to 4. So far in the games I have played there isn't a case where there are more than 5 items on the boat at a time as pieces tend to fall off pretty easily. The cards add a nice level of strategy because you will need to decide when best to be placing at a certain space on the boat and if your opponents before you may have cleared the boat of items for you, making it easier for you to place your item.
Conclusion: Surprising depth for a party game. Recommended!


Iota

Game Session and Thoughts: Played Iota again twice this week and boy what a thinky game it is. Again so far everyone who has played it really liked it and for such a small box it certainly packs a lot of game. Its incredibly hard though to catch the leader once someone has done a massive scoring and so this requires players to all be on their toes making sure they don't set up a 4-card play for another opponent. This maybe best with 2 as you won't need to worry too much about other player's stealing your slots but with 3 or 4 there is a lot of tension and a lot of tactical thinking because there is that much more chance that someone else would have played cards to screw up with your initial plans. Conclusion: Recommended!


Loopin Louie

Game Session and Thoughts: I have heard so much about this game from various podcasts and I decided to grab myself a copy to see what it is. Also, since my niece and nephew are coming over next week I thought it will be a cool gift as well for them so that my brother and sister in law can play with their kids. This is essentially a kids game (think Hungry hungry hippos) where you are banging on a stick to flip Louie who is being rotated around the board with a motor (and batteries!) so as to prevent him from tipping one of your chicken discs. The player who is the last one with unflipped chicken discs will win the game. I find myself not being able to flip Louie very well but my colleague (I played this in office) mentioned that I needed to time my lever such that Louie is not bouncing on the arm and just above my lever. LOL....
Conclusion: Its a light party like game which can be combined with drinking (i.e. drink if Louie flipped one of your chickens) which will probably make it even more fun for the intoxicated hahahaa.... I sure hope my nephew and niece will enjoy it :P
You can see a Vine video here
https://vines.s3.amazonaws.com/v/videos/4D3C706D-1C85-4850-B038-8524D41B5B38-24712-0000172EE7C3290D_1.0.6.mp4?versionId=36MRhuSmbFXnpmT4AQi4e_o3TWXpm5Jh

So all in all, a great week of gaming! Next few posts may not have so much gaming done mainly because my niece and nephew are here but knowing me, I will definitely try to find some way to have some boardgames in :P I still have many 2 player games that are waiting for me to try and I hope to at least get them played by April hahahaha.... *Cross Fingers*

Il Vecchio, The Gnomes of Zavandor, Tokaido, Bora Bora, Yedo, Mutant Meeples, Bookmaker,

Great week of gaming especially since I got to play a few hotnesses from Essen and 2013. Lets take a look:

Il Vecchio

I have heard about this game but the board and gameplay did not immediately grab me so I was interested to give it a go before I pulled the trigger. The game is quite easy to teach and learn and to play but it does have strategies and would border on the light-medium difficulty. During your turn, you can choose to activate your family member (to get resources basically), go into a city's track (to score points and get benefits), to roll dice and place new family member (spawn new workers) or recover your family members and get 1 florin (stand up your workers). That is the gist of the game! Quite easy to learn huh? The game has quite a lot of symbols thus making learning the game quite easy and the player aid is very helpful as they include details of each action and the end game scorings. Theme wise though its non existent but it doesn't make it any less enjoyable. The unique part of this game is the middleman feature. At each location, if you want to activate your family member there and a middleman token is there as well, you can put your family member at rest and get the resource and move the middleman to the next town location (middleman follow a set path around the board). Alternatively, you can spend a bishop token to get the resource without having a middleman and/or abstain from resting your family member. During the game, you are constantly thinking when is the opportune time to grab a resource and if it will cause the middleman to move to another town which will benefit your opponent. You are also wondering when to go into the various city tracks as they will give you benefits (1 time benefits like resources etc), give you end game scoring and if you  have majority, provide you more points as well at the end. There are some quirky parts in the game. For example, the board is 2-sided but the only difference is the color tones used. I wish they could have just given a different board so you have 2 sides to choose from to play. Adds to the replayability.
What surprised me was how simple the game is to learn, teach and play. In the games I have played so far, most players will often just go about getting resources and placing their family members in the outer tracks and then, mid way through the game, aim for the center tracks as these give tiles that provide a constant benefit or end game scoring tiles. In most other types of games, players usually have a end game objective(s) and thus know how to go about playing the game to score. This game allows you to just play the game or try to get the end game objective cards and then play the game. Interesting decisions to be made and quite fun. Recommended!

The Gnomes of Zavandor

In this game, players are trying to get resources in the form of 4 types of gems either from actual digging and obtaining them from the mines OR manipulation of the market and then converting these gems into actual inventions / products to score points. Once a player has scored 16 points, that will trigger the game end and whoever has the most points will win the game. When we started this game, we were very puzzled because the way the market moved is quite unusual and something we have not encountered before. During the game round, whenever you purchase or sell gems, no matter the amount, it will only move up or down by 1 slot respectively. Thus the number of times the buy/sell action is triggered will determine how many spaces it moves up and down. In addition, whenever a player builds something and pays gems, the market prices for that gem will move up by that many spaces (i.e pay 4 blue gems, price for blue will increase by 4!). Prices will only drop when players get gems due to the tokens they have collected when they dug in the mines. So the more gems that are being extracted to the players, the faster the prices will drop.
The trader ability is very powerful as it allows you to frequently convert gems to a color that you want. Initially, it was pretty confusing what was happening as this is looked like it was a mining game but we quickly realised its a stock market game instead. Once I got into the groove of things, I was busy building up an engine to get money and gems but I took too long and once my opponent started to make products which netted him points, it was hard to come back from. Apparently the products are also stacked such that the earlier you can make the products, the higher points you will net. Interesting choice of using cards as gems instead of having actual gem tokens because all knowledge (except money) is open knowledge. Might have increased the enjoyment factor if they used gem tokens instead.
Intriguing game but I doubt I will want to play it again though. Besides, where else can you find a game where the start player is SO BIG that it kinda dwarfs the game board? lol.....

Tokaido

When I first heard about this game, I was very intrigued as the art is very nice and the overall presentation of the board is fantastic. When I heard about the demo at GENCON 2012, I immediately searched for it in the big hall. However when I finally saw the copy, I was kinda disappointed. The quality of the components felt like a let down for me. I was still debating on whether to get myself a copy when I read the reviews and there were some issues here and there. Thus I was quite excited to be able to try it when my friend purchased a copy.
The game itself is very simple and straight forward. During your turn, you choose where to venture to (but must stop at each rest stop along the way). There are a few ways to score points and these are denoted by locations along the trail. You can visit a store to buy gifts, visit a location to see vistas (3 different types), visit the temple and offer donations, take a bath and have an encounter with a stranger. The player who is furthest behind on the trail will play his turn. When all players have arrived at a stop though (and ate something there), then the player who is last in will move off first.
Game ends when all players have reached the final stop. Then players will see who has majority in each of the sections mentioned above and the player with the most points will win the game.
I would say this is a light game and because of the character cards available, that will add a bit more tactical element to the game. The characters often favor 1 type of action (for example, the character I had gave me extra coin from the bank when I perform the temple action) and help you to strategise on what to do. Its not a bad game but I do wish the components felt higher quality than what they currently have. Its like an exercise in graphical design which did very well but execution could have been better. Oh and the bits used to represent your points are SO TINY that it could be a child hazard. OK for me.

Bora Bora

Ah.... first of Stefan Feld's 4 releases in 2013. Very highly anticipated and we managed to get our copies! I do love shopping online :) So what is the game like? Well to me it felt like Kingsburg due to the dice placement mechanism which is the main feature as these will provide you the actions during the game. The rest though felt very much like Trajan in that there are SO MANY things you want to do and can get distracted along the way but you only have limited actions to perform per round. The game is in 3 phases. First players will roll their dice concurrently and then, in player order, place 1 of their die on any of the action cards available. The only condition is your die must be lower than any existing die on that card. Then you perform the action. Play continues until all players have placed their die. Then Phase B begins and all players, in player order, activate 1 Man and 1 Woman tile on their player board. After that, Phase C begins and we resolve 4 sections of the board to score points, determine new starting player, buy jewellery tiles and complete objectives. The game lasts 6 rounds and after that, perform end game objectives and scoring and whoever has the most points will win the game.
The game itself has a lot of moving components. It s probably hard to grasp everything at once if you are playing this for the first time. Kinda like Stefan's other game, Trajan. There are really a lot of things to do and the 6 basic actions you can do can be utilized such that you activate sub actions. There are also god cards which "break" the rules of the game thus you have even more actions. It also doesn't help that the player board is very busy because all the symbols required for the game are crammed into the board which makes it kinda overwhelming but only at first. Surprisingly, after your first round, you will kinda get the hang of things and should be able to continue the game very smoothly which is a testament to the design of the game and the symbols used. And because what other players do can affect you greatly, there will be a lot of screwage involved in this game. It has just enough of that tactical decision and strategy that makes me glad I got my own copy of the game.
End game scoring wise, for a first game, most players can get around 150+ points which, if you are used to Stefan's games, seems to be the norm. All in all, this is an excellent game and I definitely recommend it! Makes me eager to see the other 3 games Stefan has lined up for 2013!

Yedo

I was hesitant to pull the trigger on this one but since I needed some package stuffer (to make up for the delivery charges), I decided to grab a copy. Yedo feels like Lords of Waterdeep but advanced. At the start of each round, there will first be an auction. You can get action cards which can be played during the game to affect players, grab end game objective cards that will score points at the end, get a weapon tile (used for completing missions), build a annex in your estate (which gives you certain benefits), pay for a new worker, buy a geisha (for completing missions) and get a mission card (from 4 different difficulties). After that is done, an event card will be turned over and the market for weapons is replenished. Then players will now, in player order, place a worker in one of the 7 areas available provided there are also free spaces for that area. After which, the watchman will move a space, depending on its color clockwise or counter clockwise and players will have a chance to influence the watchman to move extra spaces. All workers that are in the same area as the watchman after it has stopped will be placed back into reserve unless they have cards which will prevent this from happening. Then players will, in turn order, activate one of their workers to perform the action. During this phase, you can use the worker to complete a mission OR get the benefit of that area. Then a round is done. Phew, are you still with me? Ok good.... then you need to repeat this for ELEVEN times (yes its a 11 round game) unless someone managed to complete a hardest difficulty mission which kills the King and ends the game earlier.
As mentioned, you are effectively trying to gather resources from various locations and completing as much mission cards as you can. Mission cards have a standard reward and a bonus reward and usually provide you more money and/or resources and cards. However, unlike Lords of Waterdeep, you don't have an end game objective which will help shape the strategies that you are employing. Unless you have obtained an end game card, you are pretty much just trying to complete missions during your turn and hope they score you points and provide you resources to complete even more missions. Which leds me to whats good and whats bad about this game.
The game board is quite pretty and nice to look at but rather busy. The symbols used are also quite straight forward and easy to read and see. Components wise is pretty ok but the cardboard bits used for the weapons and geisha etc are thin. The mission cards are a rather odd (like tarot size) shape and hard to find sleeves for. Art wise is pretty nice and the mission cards have fluff which makes sense when you look at what is required to complete your mission so that's a nice touch. The game I feel, lasts way too long. ELEVEN rounds of performing the same things which is basically to complete objectives seems way too long, It might have been better if it is only half as long. The action and end game objective cards are also not particularly helpful. We did not really use many of them during the game. So while this seems like Lords of Waterdeep, I feel that Lords of Waterdeep seems to have executed it better. Besides, Lords of Waterdeep will be having an expansion out soon so I would prefer to wait for it. Still this is a try before you buy.

Mutant Meeples

I have heard of this game from Garrett's games and geekiness podcast and was intrigued by it. I had liked roborally and I had thought this was similar. Boy was I wrong. In this game, players are trying to see how many steps they can propose to try to get 1 Mutant Meeple to the crime scene. At the start, a player will draw 2 discs which will denote where the crime will occur. Then all players will try to propose a suitable plan of using up to 3 Mutant Meeples to try to land one of them onto the crime scene. The first player to propose will then flip a timer over and the rest of the players have another 30 seconds to propose as well. Once the timer is up, the player who has proposed the smallest number of steps required (in total) will show how it can be achieved. If it can, then the Mutant Meeple that has landed on the Crime Scene will be flipped to the tick side on the player's board. The first player who has 6 ticked Mutant Meeples will win the game.
The interesting portion of the game is that each of the meeples have a special power. For example, one of them can side step, another can go through walls. Make no mistake though, while this is a puzzle game, it can be very brain burning. There is also not much interaction as most of the time players are just staring at the board trying to figure out the moves in their heads. Half the players that were with us did not really get it at the beginning and only realised whats happening near the middle of the game. I am still mixed about this game because while I like the puzzle aspect of the game, there seems to be a large lack of interaction amongst the players which I do not like. I will need to play this a few more times to have a better grasp of the game. Try before you buy!

Bookmaker

After Long Shot, I have been always looking out for another horse racing game that will take its place. I decided to give this a go. After reading the rules though, I was apprehensive about how this game will be like as there seems to be some odd rule bits that I was unclear of. It does not help that on BGG there is not much activity for the game. So have I bought a lemon? Hmmm...
Since we had 6 players yesterday, I decided to bring this out and see how it works. We did not play with the rule where you can change bets because it seems to break the flow. Since players are betting concurrently with the bookmakers, it seems odd that the bookmaker can stop everything and change the bets and continue again thus the break in flow to me. There are horse cards in the game, 4 of which will be placed in the open and all players will receive 4 cards as well. Then the bookmakers (there are always 2 per round) will exchange 2 cards between themselves. Thus in this way, bookmakers will have a view of 10 cards each. Now they will write down the odds and players will then place bets with the bookmakers they want (btw the game comes with paper money instead of the chips as seen). Once all players have placed at least 1 bet (bookmakers may bet with each other but are not required to), the race will begin!
The rest of the horse cards will now be in play. Draw and reveal a horse card one at a time. The horse shown on the horse card will move a step in the race each time it is revealed. The first horse that passes the finishing line will win. Bookmakers will now pay out for the winning horse. Then the 2 players to the left will now be the new bookmakers and play continues until at least each player had a chance to be a bookmaker.
This is a party game. Pretty much depends on the group and how fun it will be. We had a friend who drummed up the excitement as he revealed each horse card so that was certainly helpful. But as party game goes, I am not too sure about this. Try before you buy!

GENCON 2013!
YEAH! I have received confirmation of my Press Pass for GENCON 2013! Which means I will be able to start to plan on what I want to do at GENCON. Definitely I will try to meetup with Tom and Eric from the Dicetower. At the same time, I want to meet with friends I have made like Joel and Stephen and play some games with them. With regards to podcasting or reporting, I will plan to do the same as last year where I twittered my pictures in real time and I hoped that was helpful to others. I will see if its possible for me to record my impressions at the end of each day and upload for distribution. I hope to also have a few interviews and perhaps try for some mass podcast episodes with the other podcasters. So it will either be me updating this blog or have a verbal podcast update every night. Its ambitious I know but lets see what can be done!

STAY TUNED! :)

Game Session: Get Bit, Bora Bora, Ground Floor, Railways of the World Card Game, Tanto Cuore, CO2, Village, Kaigan, Aladdin's Dragons

I have decided that for games which I have talked about before in previous posts, I will not elaborate too much on them unless there is something new to talk about them. With that, I played several "new" games, both in terms of to me and to the gaming industry. Lets get on with this!


Get Bit

Ah its been a long time since i brought out my copy of Get Bit and I decided to bring my lighter fare to office to play with my colleagues given the relaxed mood we want plus the short time we can play during lunch. Get Bit involves players playing cards so that they can get to move forward in the "queue". Whoever is the player closest to the shark will get bitten and loses a component / limb of their body. At the end when there are only 2 people left, the player who is furthest in front will win the game. The only and most important strategy is trying to out guess your opponents so as to ensure you won't be caught at the back with the shark. Its a light and quick game with cool bits (lego-like figures where you can pull limbs off and mix and mash and the shark) and an interesting theme. Good for a party!


Bora Bora

Stephen Feld's first of FOUR releases in 2013! I am glad our group managed to grab a hold of this copy and play it before I decide to pull the trigger on this. Final verdict? Yes I pulled the trigger and I cannot wait to try this with my other groups and see how it goes. First impressions upon opening the box is the amount of setup required. That and also the super busy player board. I mean its really jam packed with symbols galore and it was overwhelming at the beginning. Luckily though, after the first round or so, we got into the grove and the player board is actually helpful and good. But there are really quite a lot of bits and cards to setup for the game. Interestingly though, as you play through the game and pieces are put back into the box, you can start to keep these pieces and thus tear down is relatively less time consuming.
Lets talk about the gameplay itself. During the start of each round (6 rounds in total), players will roll their 3 dice concurrently. Then beginning with the start player, they will choose 1 die and place it on one of 7 areas available to perform an action. The only condition is the die placed must be smaller than any previously placed die on the same area. There are god cards that you can play to overcome this criteria. Then you will perform that action. Actions include building a new hut in an adjacent land, buying a Male or Female tile which gives you certain benefits when activated or tattooed/sea shelled, choose to tattoo a Male tile or sea shell a female tile (basically these tiles provide a 1 time benefit when tattooed/sea shelled) and many others. Once all players have placed all 3 die, then you move to phase 2 where you can activate one Male and one Female tile to gain the benefits they provide. Then you go to phase 3 where you will resolve the other areas of the board one by one. This will score you more points, award the first player, award a god tile, allow you to purchase jewellery (which gives points at the end of the game) as well as complete 1 objective and pick a new objective. All tiles not purchased are removed and a new round begins. The game will end after 6 rounds and there is 1 more final scoring and whoever has the most points will win the game.
It is certainly a very deep game with many paths to victory. In a way, you can think of this as Kingsburg advanced (due to the die placing mechanism). There are really a lot of end game scoring available and thus, like many games of this nature, you should start off with 2 or 3 objectives and then focus on them throughout the game. You will probably not fare well if you change objectives in the middle of the game. There is plenty to do and score points with and you cannot neglect any areas especially those that will provide end game scoring as there will be a lot of points to be scored at the end. The game also provides you plenty of opportunity to sabotage each other as you can place die to block opponents as well as purchase the jewellery pieces that he needed to complete an objective or take the objective he wanted away from him.
All in all, its quite a good game but I will definitely want to play more to see if there are any areas of the games that are skewed to win and thus making it mandatory to expand on that to win. Good components for an Alea game and quite well thought out game from Stephen. Recommended!


Felix the cat in the sack

Light Auction game next where each player gets a set of same cards (all cats including 2 negative point cats and 2 dogs). In a round, all players will simultaneously select a card and then, in player order, place them from left to right. Then starting with the start player, he will place a bid. This bid is to win all the cards for that turn. The first player to pass will receive 2 coins. 2nd player will receive coints and 3rd will receive 6. The winner will take all the cards (be it good or bad). The dogs help to chase away negative cats or highest positive one but will cancel each other out if both are played. The winner is the one with the most points from the cards as well as most remaining money left. Light and pretty good with oversized cards. I am not really good with auction games though as I have a problem gauging the value of a card and may often overbid. Still the group had fun as we commented on the funny artwork of the cats. Try before you buy!


Ground Floor

One of the kickstarter games that gotten a lot of hype for its components but also some people have complained quite a bit about the game for its duration and dragginess. In essence its a worker placement game where you will get more and more workers nearer to the end of the game and thus have more and more actions to take and choose from and thus surprisingly, the game can get longer. During the game we are all contractors or real estate development companies and we are trying to build our tower as high as we can so as to score a lot of points and win the game. The main currencies of the game are Information and Money but there are only about 2 or 3 options to obtain either during the game. once all players have placed their "job scheduling chips", the game will go into resolution for each job. That is the end of the round and the game will end when a player has built at least 5 stories in his tower. The game does take quite a bit of time to get thru and can get really tedious at times. The publicity track did not appeall to me to invest in as it will, at most, allow you to employ new workers first as well as decide first where to place your workers. To me, it is an OK game I guess but I don't think I will want to play it again. It just did not click with me. Components are really nice, thick boards and thick chits with a nice modern-like artwork to boot.Pity though as I really wanted to like this game. I have yet to try Skyline, the kickstarter bonus that came with the game. Try before you buy!


Railways of the World Card Game

I have been wanting to try this game for some time now as I really liked the base game however never managed to justify the cost. There was a recent warehouse sale and it was going for really cheap but I did not go down on the first day and it was snapped up quick. Managed to play that snapped up copy though so its cool. Its a relatively straight forward pick up and deliver game where you have cards that you use to lay tracks to stations and then you can choose to deliver goods. Everything that you do will score you points and the player with the most points at the end will win the game. There is an end game scoring as well based on the combination of goods you have collected as well as if your tracks are of a bigger value to a station and thus you will score points for that station as well. I tried going by the goods method while my opponent went by the laying tracks and station method and she trashed me horribly. It was not a bad game and I had fun but I will probably not play this again. A few more gripes about the game. It can get really messy. Because the cards you are laying are rather free form and there is no board, you can end up needing a lot of space to play the game and having to shift cards slightly to the left or right to accomodate for new tracks and stations. The cards aren't really of a normal size so sleeving maybe a problem.Since most scores are usually around the 150 points region, the scoring track is woefully inadequate and not large enough. The scoring bits should have been made smaller to facilitate multiple players' scoring bits on the score track. Try before you buy!


Tanto Cuore

Another game that has peaked my interest and I have wanted to try. This is a dominion-clone with 1 different mechanism and a cuter and anime-like theme. Components wise, the game is very pretty. Pink cards, nice art, anime-looking maids (some in compromising positions, be warned!) and they even provided very nice card seperators and it all fits nicely (even sleeved) into one of those boxes that you can use to store Magic the Gathering cards. During the game, players are trying to hire maids which will provide them with benefits when "serving" as well as victory points at the end of the game. Similar to Dominion, you will have 1 "serving" where you can play a Maid card to get benefits, you will have 1 hire where you can use "Love" which is the currency, to get new Maids from the town. The main difference is that you can "chamber" your maid (play the maid card into your private chambers) so as to declutter your deck. In addition, there are private maids which you can hire and they go straight to your chamber and provide you with a benefit every turn. Another smaller difference from Dominion is you can purchase bad effects to be placed into another player's private chambers. This may cause a maid to fall ill (thus preventing that maid from providing victory points or benefits) or give you negative points if not removed. The game will end when 2 maid stacks are empty in town.
This game requires a good sense of humor and the right crowd to be able to pull it off. If you role play and make suggestive tones or just simply read off the phases or your actions during the game and if the group does not get offended, then this game can be quite fun. We were amused by all the suggestive tones being made by the phases and our actions but found the game could drag on as its not that simple to just clear 2 stacks to end the game. Near the end, I got bored of repeating myself and the fun factor nosedived until we just wanted the game to end. It could be because we weren't playing properly as we just thought like we were playing dominion when we can do a lot of sabotaging on each other but we did not. I will definitely want to play this a few more times and see how it goes. I wonder if my office crowd will be amused as I am at the game :) Try before you buy!


CO2

Tried another 5 player game (yes I am asking to be punished lol) and this time the ending was quite surprising to me. Near the end of 3rd Decade we realised to our horror that the earth wasn't going to make it. The last 2 turns we negotiated with each other on how to safe the earth so that we can continue playing but a bad draw of 40-points for the last dirty power plant brought us to 500 and we lost. It was surprising to me because this is the first time the game won and we all lost. I love how my pimped out CEPs looked on the game. I also realised I played 1 rule wrongly (dang it, this rule book needs to be improved!) in that when we build a power plant, we must have at least the tech level on that particular tech tree as that many tech cubes on the power plant. This will probably cause a lot of the previous games to be tainted as well. I wonder, given the multitude of rules clarifications, if the designer realises there's something wrong with how the rules were arranged/designed and if there will be improvements in the future. Still I do enjoy the game and hope to finally play it all the way through correctly for once. Recommended!

Village

Another game of village as we helped to punch out a new sealed set and taught the owner how to play. This time however it dragged on really long as no one really wanted to finish the game. However, due to this, I found myself being able to complete the touring portion even though I started at the middle of the game and also move myself up a lot on other tracks. As usual, I forgo the market track and I won by 3 points in the end over the player that focused a lot on the market track. Its pretty interesting how, by dragging the game on, I had so much opportunity to start my travelling and went to 5 places to get quite good scoring. If you haven't gotten this game, go grab it. Expansion is coming out too and can play up to 5. Recommended!


Kaigan

Finally played Jon's hidden gem as mentioned in our podcast. Art wise, as mentioned by jon, it looks horrible. The choice of components as well is quite surprisingly. There are 2 main boards and the boards used to represent the map of Japan is made of paper. PAPER! OMG. Still gameplay wise its like Zooloretto / Coloretto on steriods. The subtle way in which you are placing your cards as well as the order in which the cards have been placed in a row and when you choose to claim a row is intriguing. Then there is another way of scoring depending on how many cubes you have placed on the map board. i think it is quite interwoven the various mechanics but during the game I wasn't really into it so much. I guess it could be because I have had several games before Kaigan and the gaudy art was not helping my involvement of the game. Still I can see the appeal of the game and I would say try before you buy!


Aladdin's Dragons

A game I have never played before and this looks really old. To my surprise, its rated within the top 500 on BGG and designed by Richard Breese and published in 2000. This game is all about bluffing and reading your opponents to win artefacts. The game will end when all artefacts have been taken and the player who has the most artefacts at the end of the game wins. During each player's turn, they will place a chit from behind their screen into one of several areas available on the board. They will place the chit face down. Each player has identical set of chits numbering from 1 to 9. After all players have placed the chits, the areas will resolve 1 by 1. The player with the highest sum total from the chits he has placed there will usually win the rewards/action of that area. Later on in the game, players have access to artefacts that can add +3 to their total OR double the value of a chit which can make the game interesting. There are spells as well which can turn a 9-point chit to a 1-point chit. There is a guard at the palace as well which you have to beat to be able to have the option to purchase artefacts. However the game can be quite prone to analysis paralysis as players can spend quite a good deal of time mulling over what to play and where to play it. For a game that is almost 13 years old, it is quite nicely designed and fun. If it ended a little earlier though might have been  much better. Try before you buy!

Zombicide Season 2 kickstarter
If you aren't aware, there was a little game called Zombicide (ok not so little) that was released from Kickstarter with much fanfare and a LOT Of miniatures. It is a co-op game where players control characters and try to survive or win in a number of scenarios as provided in the game. Recently, Cool Mini or Not (creators of Zombicide) have released Season 2 on kickstarter! It is a standalone game by itself and in the kickstarter they are also releasing Toxic City which is an expansion that is compatible with either Season 1 or Season 2. News is that within the first 2 minutes the project has been funded (their target was usd25k) and now, with 25 days to go, they are almost reaching usd600k! I have decided to back this (my first kickstarter backing!) and I can understand now why it is so addicting. To keep refreshing the page and seeing the number jump and seeing all those stretch goals being unlocked makes me all excitable but also makes the waiting that much more tedious. Still if you are interested in the game, do check it out and go back it! With the amount of goodies they throw into the game it is definitely worth while :)
Check it out here!