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Volcanoes & Other EndGames
Jan. 20th, 2005 01:26 amThere was a gaming day at EndGame on Saturday, and that always means that the next regular Wednesday gaming night is lightly attended. Such was the case tonight. I had to wait about 15 minutes after arriving before there was anything else to play, and even then it was a 2-player game.
First up was Cartagena. Neither Patrick nor I had thought to bring any truly short 2-player games (a lesson for future post-game-day game nights), so we went for this short-to-medium one instead. It was from my collection, and one we'd both played before. I think I've played this one 4 or 5 times now, and still haven't managed to win. I really don't understand what I do wrong in the strategy. I move forward well. I hit symbols chains when I can, and try and break them up for my opponents. I try and make sure I only fall back a couple of spaces, and that I maximize my doing so by hitting clusters of two, and at the same time block my opponent from doing so. And I always manage to lose. This time around Patrick beat me by a good two turns, I'd estimate.
(As we played more people did show up. I'm most pleased to say that I missed a game of Betrayal At House on the Hill which got started while we were playing. I tried not to smirk when, as soon as the haunt began, there was questioning of the rules. And this was one of the haunts without errata. One of the players through up his hands in frustration much of the way through the game, and bailed. As I said last week, fun.)
For ourselves, we gathered the two other stray players (Sam & Grant) together at this point, and played Domaine. (Patrick & I had both brought copies.) It went a little slow because of the players, but it's a good game, so I enjoyed it. Patrick got out to an early lead, and that can be deadly in Domaine because there's so much interactivity and general ability to harm an opponent. He was already falling back form the lead toward the end of the game, and then I devestated him by cutting straight across one of his domaines, isolating the majority of the land from his castle. He ended up coming in fourth. Whereas I'd played Cartagena 4 or 5 times and never won, I'd played Domaine 4 or 5 times and never lost; alas, that wasn't the case this time. I came in 3rd, and only that because of that crushing moving I made against Patrick.
(I've been doing very badly at games for a couple of weeks now. I usually win more than my fair share, but for the last couple of weeks I've lost just about everything. Too bad Kimberly's generally feeling so bad lately; she'd enjoy winning against me so much.)
By this time we were waiting for a German card game to break up, so that we could rearrange groups. Sam suggested we try a hand or two of a new game of his called Land Unter. It's a sort of weird auction game in the same way that Relationship Tightrope is; you get certain bad cards (water levels) which cost you markers (life jackets) by playing the highest cards. But, there's some complexities. You always have one water level at any time, and thus you sometimes want to take one, to lower your level; and, there are actually two water levels up on any auction, and the highest two players get them (in order), so usually being the highest player isn't too terrible of a thing, as the second highest player is who really gets stuck.
It reminded me in many ways of 6 Nimmt! because it's simultaneous action, and full of second-guessing. However, where I often feel in good control of 6 Nimmt!, that wasn't the case here. It felt entirely random. But, we didn't even finish a full hand, so I'd need to play more before I come to a true assessment. And, despite my comments on randomness, I'd probably buy a copy if I saw one cheap. It'd go good in my pack of fast card games (Category 5, King's Breakfast, Coloretto, Geschenkt, etc).
The last game of the night was the coolest. It was Der Untergang von Pompeji, the newest game by Klaus Jurgen-Wrede (of Carcassonne fame), and a game that was already on my to-buy list from the online descriptions.
It's a peculiar game, split into three phases. First you place people into the city of Pompeii through card play; then when the eruption of the volcano grows near, you start being able to move "relatives" into the city too; and then when the volcano erupts you start placing lava flow tiles while trying to get everyone out.
Overall, I bet it won't have the same staying power as Carcassonne, but it's nonetheless a great design: original and fun, with a number of interesting mechanics.
What I always find a little disappointing about Klaus Jurgen-Wrede, however, is that he refuses to try and reduce his randomness. This particular game has two areas of randomness: first in the cards you draw, which tell you where you can place figures; and second in the tiles you draw, which tell you which general areas you can place lava flow. The first part of the game is a bit more random, because it's unclear what'll really be beneficial (and because, really, the point is to set up a unique starting position before the volcano erupts, much as in Betrayal at House on the Hillwhere you have a random phase which sets up the house). It would have been really easy to reduce that randomness by allowing the drawing of the location cards from face-up piles, like Ticket to Ride, Union Pacific, Web of Power, or whatever. But, instead, you draw from a face-down deck as all those random games have done for decades.
The unique & interesting mechanics are mostly centered around the eruption, and include the method by which you place tiles (basically, lava flow has one of six icons, each of which is associated with a general area of the board), and by which you move (it's equal to the number of people in the space you're moving from).
Because the players control where new lava flow is placed, it causes some interesting, and somewhat funny results.
One of the first things I noted is that lava almost never hits ethnically diverse neighborhoods (basically, because people will rarely want to destroy there own pieces). Definitively proving that God likes color integration.
Also, the lava flows mostly seemed to head toward the city gates, because there was usually one player with no pieces in that neighborhood, who thus wanted to block exit. Clearly Pompeii was built with all the gates in valleys & other low lands.
I started the game with a superb strategy: get people just up to the city gates, away from the flows of lava, and then rather than getting them out of the city, go try and rescue other people from the city centers. It was a bad strategy; I got creamed. Because the tile pulls are random, you can have several people in a row add lava to the same area, and thus a space you thought was safe ends up not. Oops.
Anyway, I'd buy this game in a second if it was in a U.S. printing; I'm tempted by the German printings despite the high price, but I have to imagine a game by the designer of Carcassonne is going to get picked up by *someone*.
(I left for BART at about 10:50pm, but had very bad BART karma. I had to wait 19 minutes for a train. There was also a vomiting staggering Asian girl in the station; her friend thought the vomiting and staggering was very funny.)
First up was Cartagena. Neither Patrick nor I had thought to bring any truly short 2-player games (a lesson for future post-game-day game nights), so we went for this short-to-medium one instead. It was from my collection, and one we'd both played before. I think I've played this one 4 or 5 times now, and still haven't managed to win. I really don't understand what I do wrong in the strategy. I move forward well. I hit symbols chains when I can, and try and break them up for my opponents. I try and make sure I only fall back a couple of spaces, and that I maximize my doing so by hitting clusters of two, and at the same time block my opponent from doing so. And I always manage to lose. This time around Patrick beat me by a good two turns, I'd estimate.
(As we played more people did show up. I'm most pleased to say that I missed a game of Betrayal At House on the Hill which got started while we were playing. I tried not to smirk when, as soon as the haunt began, there was questioning of the rules. And this was one of the haunts without errata. One of the players through up his hands in frustration much of the way through the game, and bailed. As I said last week, fun.)
For ourselves, we gathered the two other stray players (Sam & Grant) together at this point, and played Domaine. (Patrick & I had both brought copies.) It went a little slow because of the players, but it's a good game, so I enjoyed it. Patrick got out to an early lead, and that can be deadly in Domaine because there's so much interactivity and general ability to harm an opponent. He was already falling back form the lead toward the end of the game, and then I devestated him by cutting straight across one of his domaines, isolating the majority of the land from his castle. He ended up coming in fourth. Whereas I'd played Cartagena 4 or 5 times and never won, I'd played Domaine 4 or 5 times and never lost; alas, that wasn't the case this time. I came in 3rd, and only that because of that crushing moving I made against Patrick.
(I've been doing very badly at games for a couple of weeks now. I usually win more than my fair share, but for the last couple of weeks I've lost just about everything. Too bad Kimberly's generally feeling so bad lately; she'd enjoy winning against me so much.)
By this time we were waiting for a German card game to break up, so that we could rearrange groups. Sam suggested we try a hand or two of a new game of his called Land Unter. It's a sort of weird auction game in the same way that Relationship Tightrope is; you get certain bad cards (water levels) which cost you markers (life jackets) by playing the highest cards. But, there's some complexities. You always have one water level at any time, and thus you sometimes want to take one, to lower your level; and, there are actually two water levels up on any auction, and the highest two players get them (in order), so usually being the highest player isn't too terrible of a thing, as the second highest player is who really gets stuck.
It reminded me in many ways of 6 Nimmt! because it's simultaneous action, and full of second-guessing. However, where I often feel in good control of 6 Nimmt!, that wasn't the case here. It felt entirely random. But, we didn't even finish a full hand, so I'd need to play more before I come to a true assessment. And, despite my comments on randomness, I'd probably buy a copy if I saw one cheap. It'd go good in my pack of fast card games (Category 5, King's Breakfast, Coloretto, Geschenkt, etc).
The last game of the night was the coolest. It was Der Untergang von Pompeji, the newest game by Klaus Jurgen-Wrede (of Carcassonne fame), and a game that was already on my to-buy list from the online descriptions.
It's a peculiar game, split into three phases. First you place people into the city of Pompeii through card play; then when the eruption of the volcano grows near, you start being able to move "relatives" into the city too; and then when the volcano erupts you start placing lava flow tiles while trying to get everyone out.
Overall, I bet it won't have the same staying power as Carcassonne, but it's nonetheless a great design: original and fun, with a number of interesting mechanics.
What I always find a little disappointing about Klaus Jurgen-Wrede, however, is that he refuses to try and reduce his randomness. This particular game has two areas of randomness: first in the cards you draw, which tell you where you can place figures; and second in the tiles you draw, which tell you which general areas you can place lava flow. The first part of the game is a bit more random, because it's unclear what'll really be beneficial (and because, really, the point is to set up a unique starting position before the volcano erupts, much as in Betrayal at House on the Hillwhere you have a random phase which sets up the house). It would have been really easy to reduce that randomness by allowing the drawing of the location cards from face-up piles, like Ticket to Ride, Union Pacific, Web of Power, or whatever. But, instead, you draw from a face-down deck as all those random games have done for decades.
The unique & interesting mechanics are mostly centered around the eruption, and include the method by which you place tiles (basically, lava flow has one of six icons, each of which is associated with a general area of the board), and by which you move (it's equal to the number of people in the space you're moving from).
Because the players control where new lava flow is placed, it causes some interesting, and somewhat funny results.
One of the first things I noted is that lava almost never hits ethnically diverse neighborhoods (basically, because people will rarely want to destroy there own pieces). Definitively proving that God likes color integration.
Also, the lava flows mostly seemed to head toward the city gates, because there was usually one player with no pieces in that neighborhood, who thus wanted to block exit. Clearly Pompeii was built with all the gates in valleys & other low lands.
I started the game with a superb strategy: get people just up to the city gates, away from the flows of lava, and then rather than getting them out of the city, go try and rescue other people from the city centers. It was a bad strategy; I got creamed. Because the tile pulls are random, you can have several people in a row add lava to the same area, and thus a space you thought was safe ends up not. Oops.
Anyway, I'd buy this game in a second if it was in a U.S. printing; I'm tempted by the German printings despite the high price, but I have to imagine a game by the designer of Carcassonne is going to get picked up by *someone*.
(I left for BART at about 10:50pm, but had very bad BART karma. I had to wait 19 minutes for a train. There was also a vomiting staggering Asian girl in the station; her friend thought the vomiting and staggering was very funny.)