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Game Bags & Strategic EndGames
Feb. 3rd, 2005 01:17 amI'm slowly realizing that packing a game bag is an art form. To get to EndGame, you see, I walk a mile to BART. Thus, I can't be overly generous with my games. Some of the folks who go to gaming, they bring several grocery bags or huge cardboard boxes, but me, I can only bring what I'm willing to haul a mile.
On rainy days I carry a backpack, which limits me to a max of about two serious games. For other days, I instead bring a shoulder bag. On occasion I've managed to jam 5 or 8 decent sized games in there, but usually I limit myself to 4. I think I've developed a formula that's something like this: one two-player game (in case people show up late); one to two light games (as fillers if it looks like other serious games will break up soon); and one to two serious games (in case there's too much hemming and hawing about what to play, I need to be able to toss something on the table).
Inevitably I get the formula wrong. I don't bring anything very good for 2-players, and then no one else shows up for a half-hour. Or I don't have a filler of the right length. Or whatever. Today, though, was entirely unique. My entire bag got played through. Worse, my entire bag got played through, it was only 9.30pm, and the other people milling around had no games.
Horror of horrors.
My first game of the evening was Modern Art. I've slowly come to realize that it's a game-bag prize. It's a little short for a "heavy" game, but it's entirely tiny, and thus has one of the best, most compact gameplay-to-square-inches ratios there is.
We had five for Modern Art, which is just about ideal. Myself, Sam, Alex, and a few others whose names I'm spacing on. When all was said and done I came in 3rd out of 5, and that by just $1. Not my best showing ever.
During the game Sam said a couple of times, "This is hard!" and he's right, Modern Art is a tough game. You have to keep a number of different things in your head all at once, including who's buying what, when they go, how they seem to be doing in the ranking, etc.
I can't quite quantify my mistakes in the game, but I can quantify why I lost.
First, I didn't regularly make great sales. That was particularly a problem because that's how I tend to strategize in Modern Art: great sales, and if I manage to pick up some good purchases as well, so be it. I did have one good auction, perhaps two, but I spent way too much time planning ahead. I kept holding onto cards, including double auctions, thinking that if they were valuable in this round then they'd be even more valuable in the next. That doesn't always work in Modern Art because of the limited supply of each artist's work.
Second, I got too conservative in the last round. I was being really agressive in the early rounds, and that seemed to be doing me well, but in the later rounds, as the prices skyrocketed (as they tended too) I got more and more reluctant to stick my neck out for sales that could amount to nothing. One of the players getting burned by a purchase that ended up being worthless in the third round probably just enhanced my conservatism.
I'm pretty sure that I was at the top of the pack after round three, but after round four with no purchases and no particularly notable sales, I slid backward.
Next up was The Bridges of Shangrila, the other "serious" game I'd packed today. After having hauled it to Game Night and back I now see one of the things that may have limited its appeal: it's in the wrong-sized box.
Leo Colovini seems to make games that are fairly one-dimensional abstracts that still require a lot of serious, strategic thought in that one dimension. The Bridges of Shangrila pretty much fits that definition, and I don't see it as being any deeper, or having any more replayability, than other Colovini abstracts such as Clans or Cartagena (all three games I like I should note). The big difference is that Shangrila is 4x as big and 2x as heavy as the others. Why should I (or anyone) haul it around when I could have brought two other Colovinis instead, and had more variety?
In any case, we played and everyone enjoyed it. It's definitively a good game, despite its size/content mismatch. I admired the game's design as I tried to make the hard choices of when to put out 1 master instead of 2 students, and did my best to manage keeping all 7 of my token types on the board.
I tied for the victory (including a tie-breaker tie).
Everyone seemed to be playing long games tonight. There was a Neuland and an Age of Steam: Ireland and a Puerto Rico game that inexplicably took 3 hours and a Silverton. My group finished up our Shangrila game and looked around and there was no one freeing up any time soon; thus I pulled the last game out of my bag, Rumis, which I'd brought as a filler. Ben and Becka, the two survivors of the Shangrila game and I ended up playing twice.
There's little to say here, as I've played Rumis quite a lot. It's a good game and Becka in particular seemed to really like it. I'd never played 3-player before, and I was quite surprised on the first game (The Wall) when Ben and Becka each went straight for top-level victory points, and it worked because the height limit was only 3 and there was still room to spread out. I got my mojo back by the second game (The Stairs), which plays pretty similarly with 3 as with 4, because the hieght limit of 5 doesn't come in until the back of the steps; that one I won by a couple of points.
At this point I began to wander aimlessly because my bag had been expended and I didn't particularly want to replay anything. Finally another game broke up and I hopped in to a game of Korsar (also called Pirat, apparently).
In Korsar you try and capture treasure ships by playing pirate cards; it's a sort of conflict/auction, where you have to keep playing the same color once you've started and someone gets a ship only when their turn comes around and they've got the highest value of pirates on it.
Now, I made one notable mistake in my play, which was that I held on to ships too much. It's a psychological thing, where you don't want to give up ships for other players to board, but in actuality it doesn't matter because you can play and capture them just like your opponents (though you're a little limited, because you can't match the color of other players' pirate cards, and all the other players will have had a chance to play colored cards before you). But, you're going to have to play them eventually anyway. I should have played a ship whenever I didn't need to contest a ship on my turn, to get them out my hand and free up spaces.
However, overall the game felt really random to me. There were 4 colors of pirates, plus those treasure ships, and I found it really hard to ever get more than 2 of the same colored pirate in my hand, making it just about impossible to plan any strategy in the auctions. If I played ships faster I could have alleviated this some, but my hand didn't really get clogged with ships until the end.
I came out of the game thinking that it was random and chaotic and had some bad design (namely too many possibilities for too small of a hand). I was thus shocked to learn it was a Reiner Knizia game.
Because of the designer name I'd be willing to try it again and see if more careful play could have resulted in better strategizing.
Afterward I lost my playing group, and thus had to wander aimlessly again. Eventually the Neuland group broke up and I played one last game with them. This was Money! which is an auction/set-collection game.
Each round two sets of money are put out, each one a collection of different denominations of different currencies, then each player bids a secret bid. In order of total auction value each player then takes one of sets of money--one of those first two, or a bid from a player. Then the last two sets form the basis of two new sets of money and a new round of bidding begins.
Part of the purpose of taking money is to increase your resources for future rounds of bidding. However at the end of the game you also earn points from your money--more points the more money you have of a specific type (pounds, euros, dollars, etc).
I sucked at this game like I rarely suck at games. We played three rounds and every single round I totally tanked. I'd not have enough money to make good bids because I was trying to keep my currency for sets, and then I wouldn't have enough cards in my sets to get good points.
(This was another game played with Aaron, Bob, and a few others, much like my Linie One game last week; I think they keep sharking me.)
I wonder if part of my problem was that I wasn't willing to count the cards. If I'd paid more attention to what cards went in and out of peoples' hands I might have been able to better assess what to keep working on and what to give up on. But, I'm generally not willing to put that much brain power into a "fun" activity.
Whether that was it or not, as I said, I sucked.
I was not surprised when I got home and I looked up Money! and it was also by Reiner Knizia. I was actually a little surprised that I hadn't known about such a pure-auction game that he'd designed, but in retrospective it had his fingerprints all over.
It was chaotic, like Pirat but this time I felt like if I'd been paying more attention I would have been in much better control. This is definitely one I want to play again.
On rainy days I carry a backpack, which limits me to a max of about two serious games. For other days, I instead bring a shoulder bag. On occasion I've managed to jam 5 or 8 decent sized games in there, but usually I limit myself to 4. I think I've developed a formula that's something like this: one two-player game (in case people show up late); one to two light games (as fillers if it looks like other serious games will break up soon); and one to two serious games (in case there's too much hemming and hawing about what to play, I need to be able to toss something on the table).
Inevitably I get the formula wrong. I don't bring anything very good for 2-players, and then no one else shows up for a half-hour. Or I don't have a filler of the right length. Or whatever. Today, though, was entirely unique. My entire bag got played through. Worse, my entire bag got played through, it was only 9.30pm, and the other people milling around had no games.
Horror of horrors.
My first game of the evening was Modern Art. I've slowly come to realize that it's a game-bag prize. It's a little short for a "heavy" game, but it's entirely tiny, and thus has one of the best, most compact gameplay-to-square-inches ratios there is.
We had five for Modern Art, which is just about ideal. Myself, Sam, Alex, and a few others whose names I'm spacing on. When all was said and done I came in 3rd out of 5, and that by just $1. Not my best showing ever.
During the game Sam said a couple of times, "This is hard!" and he's right, Modern Art is a tough game. You have to keep a number of different things in your head all at once, including who's buying what, when they go, how they seem to be doing in the ranking, etc.
I can't quite quantify my mistakes in the game, but I can quantify why I lost.
First, I didn't regularly make great sales. That was particularly a problem because that's how I tend to strategize in Modern Art: great sales, and if I manage to pick up some good purchases as well, so be it. I did have one good auction, perhaps two, but I spent way too much time planning ahead. I kept holding onto cards, including double auctions, thinking that if they were valuable in this round then they'd be even more valuable in the next. That doesn't always work in Modern Art because of the limited supply of each artist's work.
Second, I got too conservative in the last round. I was being really agressive in the early rounds, and that seemed to be doing me well, but in the later rounds, as the prices skyrocketed (as they tended too) I got more and more reluctant to stick my neck out for sales that could amount to nothing. One of the players getting burned by a purchase that ended up being worthless in the third round probably just enhanced my conservatism.
I'm pretty sure that I was at the top of the pack after round three, but after round four with no purchases and no particularly notable sales, I slid backward.
Next up was The Bridges of Shangrila, the other "serious" game I'd packed today. After having hauled it to Game Night and back I now see one of the things that may have limited its appeal: it's in the wrong-sized box.
Leo Colovini seems to make games that are fairly one-dimensional abstracts that still require a lot of serious, strategic thought in that one dimension. The Bridges of Shangrila pretty much fits that definition, and I don't see it as being any deeper, or having any more replayability, than other Colovini abstracts such as Clans or Cartagena (all three games I like I should note). The big difference is that Shangrila is 4x as big and 2x as heavy as the others. Why should I (or anyone) haul it around when I could have brought two other Colovinis instead, and had more variety?
In any case, we played and everyone enjoyed it. It's definitively a good game, despite its size/content mismatch. I admired the game's design as I tried to make the hard choices of when to put out 1 master instead of 2 students, and did my best to manage keeping all 7 of my token types on the board.
I tied for the victory (including a tie-breaker tie).
Everyone seemed to be playing long games tonight. There was a Neuland and an Age of Steam: Ireland and a Puerto Rico game that inexplicably took 3 hours and a Silverton. My group finished up our Shangrila game and looked around and there was no one freeing up any time soon; thus I pulled the last game out of my bag, Rumis, which I'd brought as a filler. Ben and Becka, the two survivors of the Shangrila game and I ended up playing twice.
There's little to say here, as I've played Rumis quite a lot. It's a good game and Becka in particular seemed to really like it. I'd never played 3-player before, and I was quite surprised on the first game (The Wall) when Ben and Becka each went straight for top-level victory points, and it worked because the height limit was only 3 and there was still room to spread out. I got my mojo back by the second game (The Stairs), which plays pretty similarly with 3 as with 4, because the hieght limit of 5 doesn't come in until the back of the steps; that one I won by a couple of points.
At this point I began to wander aimlessly because my bag had been expended and I didn't particularly want to replay anything. Finally another game broke up and I hopped in to a game of Korsar (also called Pirat, apparently).
In Korsar you try and capture treasure ships by playing pirate cards; it's a sort of conflict/auction, where you have to keep playing the same color once you've started and someone gets a ship only when their turn comes around and they've got the highest value of pirates on it.
Now, I made one notable mistake in my play, which was that I held on to ships too much. It's a psychological thing, where you don't want to give up ships for other players to board, but in actuality it doesn't matter because you can play and capture them just like your opponents (though you're a little limited, because you can't match the color of other players' pirate cards, and all the other players will have had a chance to play colored cards before you). But, you're going to have to play them eventually anyway. I should have played a ship whenever I didn't need to contest a ship on my turn, to get them out my hand and free up spaces.
However, overall the game felt really random to me. There were 4 colors of pirates, plus those treasure ships, and I found it really hard to ever get more than 2 of the same colored pirate in my hand, making it just about impossible to plan any strategy in the auctions. If I played ships faster I could have alleviated this some, but my hand didn't really get clogged with ships until the end.
I came out of the game thinking that it was random and chaotic and had some bad design (namely too many possibilities for too small of a hand). I was thus shocked to learn it was a Reiner Knizia game.
Because of the designer name I'd be willing to try it again and see if more careful play could have resulted in better strategizing.
Afterward I lost my playing group, and thus had to wander aimlessly again. Eventually the Neuland group broke up and I played one last game with them. This was Money! which is an auction/set-collection game.
Each round two sets of money are put out, each one a collection of different denominations of different currencies, then each player bids a secret bid. In order of total auction value each player then takes one of sets of money--one of those first two, or a bid from a player. Then the last two sets form the basis of two new sets of money and a new round of bidding begins.
Part of the purpose of taking money is to increase your resources for future rounds of bidding. However at the end of the game you also earn points from your money--more points the more money you have of a specific type (pounds, euros, dollars, etc).
I sucked at this game like I rarely suck at games. We played three rounds and every single round I totally tanked. I'd not have enough money to make good bids because I was trying to keep my currency for sets, and then I wouldn't have enough cards in my sets to get good points.
(This was another game played with Aaron, Bob, and a few others, much like my Linie One game last week; I think they keep sharking me.)
I wonder if part of my problem was that I wasn't willing to count the cards. If I'd paid more attention to what cards went in and out of peoples' hands I might have been able to better assess what to keep working on and what to give up on. But, I'm generally not willing to put that much brain power into a "fun" activity.
Whether that was it or not, as I said, I sucked.
I was not surprised when I got home and I looked up Money! and it was also by Reiner Knizia. I was actually a little surprised that I hadn't known about such a pure-auction game that he'd designed, but in retrospective it had his fingerprints all over.
It was chaotic, like Pirat but this time I felt like if I'd been paying more attention I would have been in much better control. This is definitely one I want to play again.