![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Selfish EndGames
May. 5th, 2005 01:53 pmI was pretty exhausted yesterday eve, but I went ahead and headed out to EndGame anyway. Despite the exhaustion I knew it would be somewhat stress-relieving, and besides that it'd give Kimberly some time alone, something she'd been wanting since this last weekend.
So at EndGame I usually try and be really considerate of what people might enjoy and do all the consensus twaddle about what we should play. Today, because I'd had such a terrible, terrible week (top 5 materia, here) I decided to just be selfish and suggest up what I wanted to play. oO I got to play some things that made me fairly happy and saved everyone the 10-15 usual minutes of "What-should-we-play?".
First game of the night was Ingenious by Reiner Knizia, which Patrick had brought. Our other players were Tom and Sam. This is an abstract game with a very simple basis: you have domino type pieces, except each side is a hexagon. Each of these hexagons has one of six colors on it. You place a domino piece on the board, then you score points for every hex of the same color running in a line out from any of the five sides of the hex (other than the other side of the domino). Most frequently this means that you put a hex at the end of a line of a specific color, then score the whole line, but also you can put a hex amidst a color, and score several lines going out of the different directions.
As in T&E your final score is your lowest score of all the colors. You also get a bonus if you max out a color at 18. A free turn. But you have to yell, "in-geeeee-nious".
The game has a bunch of nice aspects. Strategy (what color do I need to work on, based on my points and my hand of 6 tiles?). Tactics (how can I make a brilliant play this turn?). Blocking (how can I keep the next player from scoring even more points than I?).
I was the only player who hadn't played before, but Patrick was definitely the most familiar with the game. At the start Patrick was the only one really blocking, but I caught on partway through the game. Basically, you can play in one of two ways: selfishly (trying to earn points from both halves of your domino) or selflessly (using the second half of your domino to help block the great score that you just made, so that the next player doesn't get your points +1). Each has its place.
Red was scarce throughout our game because no really huge fields appeared, as they did for green and yellow. I was thus often thinking about how to increase my red score. Patrick was leading early on, hitting a few ingeniouses before any of the rest of us were close. He was sitting to my left, and I probably slowed him down a bit later in the game as I caught on to blocking. I had one really fun turn where I hit three ingenious in a row, and thus got three extra turns. It didn't necessarily benefit my points, since those colors were already high, but they were essentially free turns which let me circulate tiles and also block off some further scoring while I was at it.
Somehow Sam managed to pull out a win in the end. I'm not entirely sure how, because he was sitting behind me and Patrick, and thus should have had the least opportunities to make high-scoring plays. He had just about everything maxed out on the last turn, and managed a few Ingeniouses which let him close out the board. Final score was Sam-15, me-14, Patrick-12, and Tom-10. A few people commented that this was quite high scoring.
Next up was La Citta which Sam had apparently just bought from Dave G., and which I've watched enviously in the past when other people had it out. We had much the same crew, with Dave G. substituting for Patrick.
La Citta is a resource management and logistical game. You have a terrain of wheat fields, water, and mountains, and in the spaces between those terrains you build cities. There are many city tiles. Mines built next to mountains give you money, which you need to play various cards; farms built next to wheat fields give you food, which you need to feed your people; markets and fountains let you increase the max population of a city; and various other tiles give you advances in three general fields (culture, education, health).
Now the city building is very interesting, with various reasons to build various city buildings at various locations. I'm always interested in a game that approaches a SimCity sort of thing in new ways, and this one does. Likewise the action system, where you have a couple of actions you can always do, and other actions you can do based on random card draws largely works (except one overly useful card, the Master Builder, which gives undue benefit to whomever happens to get it).
The logistics of the game, though, are a nightmare. At the end of a round you flip over some partially hidden cards to see whether citizens were most interested in culture, education, or health that round. Then people move between nearby cities based on who has those items. This can cause you to lose some buildings, including your food-producing farms, if your population was too close to your building number. Then you have to use your farms to feed your remaining population.
Dave G. (who was in the lead throughout the game, partially because it was his game, but I also think partially because he's good at logistical games) kept track of all of this and every round knew how much food he was going to need based upon his likely population, after migrations, at the end of a turn. (Well, he mostly kept track; he accidently starved someone once midgame, which later cost him a turn.) After a few rounds of play, as cities got closer together and thus interactions got more likely, I started to throw up my hands. I could have counted things out each turn, but it was more effort than I really wanted to expend on a game.
In my last round of play I just built a bunch of extra farms, figuring that they'd probably be enough, even if I had a big influx of population. It wasn't.
By the end of the game Sam was clearly losing pretty badly because he'd never had money because the only mine he'd ever built had been destroyed pretty quickly due to population flux away from his city. Tom had been doing so-so. He had a huge money advantage (5 gold a round at some points), but he'd generally been losing population, not gaining it. I meanwhile was doing pretty good, despite my refusal to figure out exact food numbers at the end. I'd been doing my best to grow my cities with marketplaces and fountains, and also trying to stay at least even on cultural, health, and education, so that I usually wasn't losing population.
Final score was David-41, Me-31, Tom-25, and Sam-14. I would have had 38 points instead, for a much more respectable second place finish, if I hadn't lost two population due to starvation on the final round, and then taken an additional 5 point penalty for the same.
A very interesting game, but one that goes into the same category for me as Age of Steam, Power Grid and Goldbrau where I'm not likely to play it often because so much continual calculation is required. (I actually though LC was worse than any of the others, but then I was less familiar with the calculations).
Chris A. showed up during gaming, much to my surprise, and I ended up getting a ride home.
So at EndGame I usually try and be really considerate of what people might enjoy and do all the consensus twaddle about what we should play. Today, because I'd had such a terrible, terrible week (top 5 materia, here) I decided to just be selfish and suggest up what I wanted to play. oO I got to play some things that made me fairly happy and saved everyone the 10-15 usual minutes of "What-should-we-play?".
First game of the night was Ingenious by Reiner Knizia, which Patrick had brought. Our other players were Tom and Sam. This is an abstract game with a very simple basis: you have domino type pieces, except each side is a hexagon. Each of these hexagons has one of six colors on it. You place a domino piece on the board, then you score points for every hex of the same color running in a line out from any of the five sides of the hex (other than the other side of the domino). Most frequently this means that you put a hex at the end of a line of a specific color, then score the whole line, but also you can put a hex amidst a color, and score several lines going out of the different directions.
As in T&E your final score is your lowest score of all the colors. You also get a bonus if you max out a color at 18. A free turn. But you have to yell, "in-geeeee-nious".
The game has a bunch of nice aspects. Strategy (what color do I need to work on, based on my points and my hand of 6 tiles?). Tactics (how can I make a brilliant play this turn?). Blocking (how can I keep the next player from scoring even more points than I?).
I was the only player who hadn't played before, but Patrick was definitely the most familiar with the game. At the start Patrick was the only one really blocking, but I caught on partway through the game. Basically, you can play in one of two ways: selfishly (trying to earn points from both halves of your domino) or selflessly (using the second half of your domino to help block the great score that you just made, so that the next player doesn't get your points +1). Each has its place.
Red was scarce throughout our game because no really huge fields appeared, as they did for green and yellow. I was thus often thinking about how to increase my red score. Patrick was leading early on, hitting a few ingeniouses before any of the rest of us were close. He was sitting to my left, and I probably slowed him down a bit later in the game as I caught on to blocking. I had one really fun turn where I hit three ingenious in a row, and thus got three extra turns. It didn't necessarily benefit my points, since those colors were already high, but they were essentially free turns which let me circulate tiles and also block off some further scoring while I was at it.
Somehow Sam managed to pull out a win in the end. I'm not entirely sure how, because he was sitting behind me and Patrick, and thus should have had the least opportunities to make high-scoring plays. He had just about everything maxed out on the last turn, and managed a few Ingeniouses which let him close out the board. Final score was Sam-15, me-14, Patrick-12, and Tom-10. A few people commented that this was quite high scoring.
Next up was La Citta which Sam had apparently just bought from Dave G., and which I've watched enviously in the past when other people had it out. We had much the same crew, with Dave G. substituting for Patrick.
La Citta is a resource management and logistical game. You have a terrain of wheat fields, water, and mountains, and in the spaces between those terrains you build cities. There are many city tiles. Mines built next to mountains give you money, which you need to play various cards; farms built next to wheat fields give you food, which you need to feed your people; markets and fountains let you increase the max population of a city; and various other tiles give you advances in three general fields (culture, education, health).
Now the city building is very interesting, with various reasons to build various city buildings at various locations. I'm always interested in a game that approaches a SimCity sort of thing in new ways, and this one does. Likewise the action system, where you have a couple of actions you can always do, and other actions you can do based on random card draws largely works (except one overly useful card, the Master Builder, which gives undue benefit to whomever happens to get it).
The logistics of the game, though, are a nightmare. At the end of a round you flip over some partially hidden cards to see whether citizens were most interested in culture, education, or health that round. Then people move between nearby cities based on who has those items. This can cause you to lose some buildings, including your food-producing farms, if your population was too close to your building number. Then you have to use your farms to feed your remaining population.
Dave G. (who was in the lead throughout the game, partially because it was his game, but I also think partially because he's good at logistical games) kept track of all of this and every round knew how much food he was going to need based upon his likely population, after migrations, at the end of a turn. (Well, he mostly kept track; he accidently starved someone once midgame, which later cost him a turn.) After a few rounds of play, as cities got closer together and thus interactions got more likely, I started to throw up my hands. I could have counted things out each turn, but it was more effort than I really wanted to expend on a game.
In my last round of play I just built a bunch of extra farms, figuring that they'd probably be enough, even if I had a big influx of population. It wasn't.
By the end of the game Sam was clearly losing pretty badly because he'd never had money because the only mine he'd ever built had been destroyed pretty quickly due to population flux away from his city. Tom had been doing so-so. He had a huge money advantage (5 gold a round at some points), but he'd generally been losing population, not gaining it. I meanwhile was doing pretty good, despite my refusal to figure out exact food numbers at the end. I'd been doing my best to grow my cities with marketplaces and fountains, and also trying to stay at least even on cultural, health, and education, so that I usually wasn't losing population.
Final score was David-41, Me-31, Tom-25, and Sam-14. I would have had 38 points instead, for a much more respectable second place finish, if I hadn't lost two population due to starvation on the final round, and then taken an additional 5 point penalty for the same.
A very interesting game, but one that goes into the same category for me as Age of Steam, Power Grid and Goldbrau where I'm not likely to play it often because so much continual calculation is required. (I actually though LC was worse than any of the others, but then I was less familiar with the calculations).
Chris A. showed up during gaming, much to my surprise, and I ended up getting a ride home.