Back at Dice Tower West
This game was brought by Eric partially due to his love for high combinatoric card games. It's a game where you draw cards, get, money, play them in a private tableau, score income and vp from them.
Each round you draw cards equal to twice the number of players, sort them by their five suits and place then around a circular central board. Each player then takes turns "reserving" a card and after that play their turns.
Some interesting things about this game:
- When a player "reserves" a card they can later either take the card into their hand to play later or gain some money. The amount of money depends on the card's suit.
- Money is severely limited. You can only keep four coins but the denominations are 1, 3, 6 so four coins can be a lot or a little money. When you spend money you can't get change.
- You cannot have more cards in your personal tableau than the number of the current round. There are cards that cause cards to be discarded or returned to your hand but they are not super common. You can pay coins equal to the current round to discard a card but this is pretty expensive.
- There is no limit to your handsize. This is extremely unusual but makes sense with the coin / played card restrictions.
The interaction is limited to card reservation and the occasional hate card that targets another player. Most of the game is about players trying to create broken combos. In the two player game that Eric and I played I felt pretty trapped by the card selection but Eric did ok. In the second four player game we both created rediculous combos. I think Eric liked this but I felt like I just tried a strategy and got lucky with the card draw.
There are definitely some interesting mechanics in this game but I'm not as interested in combos as Eric is and I am not as attracted to the limited interaction.
I was a little wary about this one because it was based on Scythe which I didn't much care for.
Each player has a couple starting characters, (cards) a big mech, (token that marches around a hex map), and you get more cards during the game and tuck them under your mech card to increase abilities and end game vp. The game has an interesting mechanic where your hand is face up (if you're not a cheater) and cards easily bounce between in-play and your hand.
The exploration mechanic kind of fell flat to me. You explore the same hexes every game, they are just shuffled differently. Players compete to gain a point salad of victory conditions and boast about them. I don't know, the game just didn't seem compelling to me.
The worst rules ever. Once we got over this we started to see some interesting things.
Each player has a deck that represents some ancient civilization. In addition, they have cards that are slowly added to the deck that represent the civilization advancing. Players also have ways of removing cards from their decks.
When a player's civilization moves from barbarian to empire: a barbarian cards can no longer be played, and more powerful empire cards can be played. A player has to be aware of this and try to cull the old cards and add new cards in anticipation of this transition. I'm not sure if the transition is necessary. I think the winner in our group was still in the barbarian stage. This was my favorite mechanic of the game but that opinion was not shared by other players of the group.
Played cards are not very permanent. There are a lot of actions that can wipe out cards both by the player who owns the cards as well as other players. While players can steal resources and wipe out other player's cards it did not seem targeted.
Both Eric and Chris expressed an interest in making a pared down, not broken version of this game. There might be a gem hidden inside the messy rules and mechanics.
We had a group that liked crunchier games. We tried to get a copy of Brass Birmingham but the copies where checked out so we played Lancashire instead. I don't think I'll ever get to play Brass: Birmingham.
I had a lot of fun with this game and tried to win without taking loans. It made for a tight first third but the income was plentiful for the last two thirds. I don't think it's a good strategy. I also built too few buildings but went nuts building connections. I didn't win but came in second or third.
This game had some crazy market swings with coal getting depleted several times. I ended up being the person to refill the coal which gave me money I didn't need but denied other players cash and prevented my coal mines from being overwritten.
I was really impressed with Wyatt's play as a first time player. He really picked up the rules quickly and utilized loans really well to build some ships. He might have come in second, I don't remember.
Pat did an interesting strategy and flooded the market with iron. He didn't get much money but was able to flip all his iron buildings fairly early. We all got cheap iron (I was able to develop quite a bit) but I think he got some decent points by having some of them score in both epochs.
As usual, this game was very different from my previous Brass games. I really like these Martin Wallace games. They have such interesting player interaction.
This was the second play with four players. I talked about it in the first entry.
This is a game where you play cards from your hand into your private tableau and pay for them by discarding other cards, San Juan-esque. As the game proceeds, a large selection of face-up cards builds in the center and is periodically wiped. This makes it a little easier to get the cards you want.
The base cards you play are trees. Mushrooms, ferns, and varmints are played under the tree, birds and butterflies can be played over a tree, and larger animals like foxes and deer can be played to the side of a tree. The final tableau of all players looks really cool with animals peeking out from behind trees. The theme is very good.
The deck is giant and has a ton of combos. You can utilize combos but just playing trees as there are some that want a variety of trees, some that want the same one, and everything in between, adding the animals and other things makes the combos explode.
As pretty as this game is, it's another multi-player solitaire where you spend most of the time looking at your own hand and your own tableu. The biggest interaction is when some other player grabs the card you want, or worse, resets all the available cards and you watch your precious winning combo card go down the drain.
On a positive note, I found it easy to look across the table and get a sense of what strategy the other players were going for. Maybe the thematic cards makes that possible.
This was another game where you take turns selecting pieces to tetris into your own private grid.
The difficult twist was that buildings need to be touching the same suit of buildings or have to touch a road that you extend throughout your tableau.
The fun twist was the existence of brightly colored and multi-shaped wonders that you have to try to squeeze into your tableau. There were lots of extra restrictions that required them to be next to certain buildings, water, or parks. There were also some crazy multi-piece wonders that had rules about how you place them relative to each other.
Needless to say I hated this game. So much fiddly puzzle fitting.
A new gamefound edition is out with luxury pieces. I ran this with Eric and Kurt. Unfortunately it had been so many years since I had played this game that I had forgotted some of the rules and we played a few things wrong.
Kurt and Eric didn't like all the fiddlyness of the game and the rules. I still love that game. Once you internalize the rules you can start playing through the huge variety of the scenarios.
I think I like complexity as a way to make co-op games more interesting.
This is actually a ten year old game that Eric wanted to play.
Unfortunately we started it with some expansion pieces and no rules to the expansion so we were confused for a while. Eventually we realized what was going on and removed all the expansion pieces.
This game pretends to be an area control game with players establishing locations on a map but the truth is that there are multiple ways to jump across the board and there are also incentives for building a small, densly populated area. So rushing in and cutting other players off is not as bad as other area control games.
The game has tons of cards and a fiddly mechanism for performing the actions on them. (I won't go into it here because I didn't think it was that interesting). There was one mechanic that requires you to play all suits of each card type in order to build the victory condition "temples". Both Kurt and I had terrible time finding our much needed suit and wasted many turns digging through the deck to complete our matches.
I have mixed feelings about this game. I would definitely play better in my second game and I appreciate the apparent multiple paths you can take to victory. The hate cards in the game don't help.
This game brought the most screams and laughs of any game we played at the con.
No one was trying to lose but most of us were more concerned about adding chaos to the game than winning until the end neared. There was lots of randomness and unexpected things. It was a lot of fun.
I don't think this game would replay well for me. The experience was like watching big action movie that was fun to go through but repeated plays would have me knowing the odds of all the hidden obstacles, damage, and die rolls and I would just be frustrated when things didn't go my way, and stop caring about my decisions.
By the way, all the chaos that was going on made it super fun even when it was someone else's turn. That's very rare in a game.
I playtested Tom's game which was a fun experience. I probably shouldn't say anything here since he is still working on it.