Wacky Weather

We've been having truly wacky weather the last couple of days. We get 10 minutes of torrential downpour, then a few minutes later the sun is out and shining brightly. Out the window next to my desk I get to watch the bad new walkway that my neighbors recently put in flood and drain again and again.

The combination may be enough to finally deter me from biking in to EndGame tonight--for the first time of the season. But with the wacky weather, RADAR and even eyeball are useless to see if we've got rain coming up. We'll see if things have settled by evening.

On the bright side, for the first time in a month, it looks like we get clear weather this Sunday! I've been itching for another bike adventure. I'm going to probably go up to Point Richmond to cover the one part of the Bay Trail I missed last month (unless I can talk Kimberly into riding, in which case it'd be back over the hills, to Lafayette, I expect).

Alea Analysis #2: Chinatown (Big Box #2)

This is the second of my articles commenting on all of the Alea games, as I play them. If you'd like to read the whole series, just click on the alea games tag.

The second Alea Game is Chinatown, and just as Ra was one of my first Euro Holy Grails, Chinatown was one of my last. I didn't get to play it until ... well, today.

Chinatown is a negotiation game. You have three commodities: locations in the city; business tiles; and cash. The object is to get locations in the city that are contiguous, so that you can build a single type of business across those contiguous tiles, maximizing its valuation.

There's a bit of brinkmanship thrown into the negotiation, as you have to decide whether to build your businesses early (which maximizes your income over the course of the game) or later (which improves your negotiating position since you're not committed, and increases the odds that you'll get to build complete sets of buildings together, both of which are likely to result in you earning more cash at those points). The ultimate object of the game is to gather as much money as you can, so these points aren't academic.

Chinatown's strength is ultimately that it pretty pure negotiation and it's simple. You can make meaningful value assessments and trade or pay accordingly. This does mean that things can get really mathematical toward the end of the game, but you could say the same for Modern Art, so that's not necessarily a strike against the game.

Chinatown's weakness is ultimately that it's pretty pure negotation and it's simple. Because of the pure negotiation, especially when combined with the mathiness, Chinatown isn't a very colorful game. Because of the simplicity, I think that Chinatown would be compared pretty unfavorably by many people to The Traders of Genoa, Alea's other, much denser negotiation game. If you want a 45-minute simple game, then clearly Traders can't compete with Chinatown, but as a big-box Alea game, I think that Chinatown has been left behind by most of the other releases.

Before I close out, I find it interesting to contrast Chinatown with Ra. There's no doubt about it, Chinatown is random. But then, Ra was too. In both you're randomly drawing the resources that are at the heart of the game (the lots in Ra, the locations and businesses in Chinatown). The difference is that in Ra the randomness is at least somewhat offset by the auctions, while in Chinatown, a lucky tile dropping in your lap relieves you of any need to pay more for it. In fact a lucky set of tiles at the beginning of the game can make a big difference.

(In the game I played tonight, where I won by $4, I have to believe the set of three adjacent tiles that I drew in round 3, when I also had a complete set of a size-3 business in my hand, decided the game.)

On sum, I think Chinatown is an OK game, but that there are a lot of really good games in the Alea series. And with that said, here's my ratings of the whole series of Alea games to date:

1. Ra (Plays: 15)
   
2. Chinatown (Plays: 1)
   

Having finally played Chinatown, I looked up what else Karsten Hartwig had designed. Seeing that one of his other scant few designs is Augsburg 1520, my immediate thought was, "Another very mathy game, but probably a superior one."

The Alea version of Chinatown is long out of print, but Z-Man Games reprinted it last year. I haven't seen the new edition; one of my friends brought in the Alea original for me at EndGame tonight.