Saturday Gaming
Aug. 8th, 2005 12:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aRealized that I never wrote about gaming on Saturday, and it had some interesting elements, so here you go.
I ultimately decided to game with my regular RPG group on Saturday, because I've neglected them recently, and may be neglecting them in the near future too. However Dave P., who was supposed to run, made a last minute cancellation, and so we ended up playing board games instead.
This was just as well for me because I've had a number of Mayfair/daVinci games which I'm supposed to be reviewing, but I've been having trouble getting a good play out of them. So, I brought a few of those, and a "fun" game as well, which was ironically Vinci.
First up was Fredericus. This is a neat, tactical card game that really excited me when I received it because it was one of the most gamer's games that daVinci has produced, and the direction that I'd like to see them go further in.
As before the early and mid game play was really neat, with a lot of opportunity for clever play. But then, as before, the end game largely broke, with the monsters you're trying to capture ending up so buried that there was just about no way to sensibly capture them without helping out your opponents more.
However this time I did figure out a bit better why the game was broken in the end game and how to fix it, so I'm ready to review it now.
Second up was Oriente. This is a very peculiar game wherein you clash with other characters in an Oriental Samurai world. I can barely even figure out how to describe it, but the core idea is that you have a role, and each turn you try and use that role to get treasure cards from other player in various ways, and sometimes your role gets killed and refilled.
Some combination of the rules & gameplay is very nonintuitive, and my first game I was puzzled going in and puzzled coming out (though we'd figured out how to play in the meantime). After a second game I feel like there's a lot of awkwardness implicit in the system, but I was more happy to play it.
It's ready for review now too, since I at least felt like I knew what I was doing this second time.
The good side of that all is that I can review two of my pending games before GenCon; the bad side is that I have to find the time to do the same.
Last game of the day was Vinci, which I brought mainly for Kevin, because he doesn't like most of the lightly themed German games I bring. So, I figured I'd bring him a wargame. (Though later he said that Vinci wasn't a wargame, but that he had enjoyed it anyway.)
This game of Vinci was a little peculiar in that one of the players (Kevin, of course) did something entirely bizarre. He decided that he didn't want to play the empire-churning point-building game that is Vinci. Instead he wanted to build on a civilization that would stand the test of time, and keep it. That's just not Vinci, which is all about building a civilization up, then jumping out before it crashes.
The funny thing was that Kevin managed it (though he didn't win).
He started out with a double-fortification civilization, which let him put a fortification on each and every space. He flowed over Iberia, western France, Britain, and Ireland. Then he switched civilizations (just once) and grabbed a new civilization with Heritage. He started off around Italy, then swamped Western Europe, running alongside his old civilization the whole time. At the end of the game he had his pieces forming a solid color throughout all of western Europe. He hadn't lost a single one of his old civilization spaces.
Kevin was in a far last place for much of the game, as he sat on that double-fort civilization longer than he should have, but when he jumped to the heritage civilization he really started cranking up the points. He was getting 14 or 15 a turn by game end. He came in third, though second to fifth were all pretty tight in the pack. If he had one more turn, and wasn't crushed in the meantime, he would have easily made second, with first in sight. (But Vinci is, of course, a game of timing the end game.)
I'd never seen its like, though it wouldn't have been possible without the exact right combination of civilizations. (To be fair, though, Kevin waited for that heritage, then leapt at it.)
I ultimately decided to game with my regular RPG group on Saturday, because I've neglected them recently, and may be neglecting them in the near future too. However Dave P., who was supposed to run, made a last minute cancellation, and so we ended up playing board games instead.
This was just as well for me because I've had a number of Mayfair/daVinci games which I'm supposed to be reviewing, but I've been having trouble getting a good play out of them. So, I brought a few of those, and a "fun" game as well, which was ironically Vinci.
First up was Fredericus. This is a neat, tactical card game that really excited me when I received it because it was one of the most gamer's games that daVinci has produced, and the direction that I'd like to see them go further in.
As before the early and mid game play was really neat, with a lot of opportunity for clever play. But then, as before, the end game largely broke, with the monsters you're trying to capture ending up so buried that there was just about no way to sensibly capture them without helping out your opponents more.
However this time I did figure out a bit better why the game was broken in the end game and how to fix it, so I'm ready to review it now.
Second up was Oriente. This is a very peculiar game wherein you clash with other characters in an Oriental Samurai world. I can barely even figure out how to describe it, but the core idea is that you have a role, and each turn you try and use that role to get treasure cards from other player in various ways, and sometimes your role gets killed and refilled.
Some combination of the rules & gameplay is very nonintuitive, and my first game I was puzzled going in and puzzled coming out (though we'd figured out how to play in the meantime). After a second game I feel like there's a lot of awkwardness implicit in the system, but I was more happy to play it.
It's ready for review now too, since I at least felt like I knew what I was doing this second time.
The good side of that all is that I can review two of my pending games before GenCon; the bad side is that I have to find the time to do the same.
Last game of the day was Vinci, which I brought mainly for Kevin, because he doesn't like most of the lightly themed German games I bring. So, I figured I'd bring him a wargame. (Though later he said that Vinci wasn't a wargame, but that he had enjoyed it anyway.)
This game of Vinci was a little peculiar in that one of the players (Kevin, of course) did something entirely bizarre. He decided that he didn't want to play the empire-churning point-building game that is Vinci. Instead he wanted to build on a civilization that would stand the test of time, and keep it. That's just not Vinci, which is all about building a civilization up, then jumping out before it crashes.
The funny thing was that Kevin managed it (though he didn't win).
He started out with a double-fortification civilization, which let him put a fortification on each and every space. He flowed over Iberia, western France, Britain, and Ireland. Then he switched civilizations (just once) and grabbed a new civilization with Heritage. He started off around Italy, then swamped Western Europe, running alongside his old civilization the whole time. At the end of the game he had his pieces forming a solid color throughout all of western Europe. He hadn't lost a single one of his old civilization spaces.
Kevin was in a far last place for much of the game, as he sat on that double-fort civilization longer than he should have, but when he jumped to the heritage civilization he really started cranking up the points. He was getting 14 or 15 a turn by game end. He came in third, though second to fifth were all pretty tight in the pack. If he had one more turn, and wasn't crushed in the meantime, he would have easily made second, with first in sight. (But Vinci is, of course, a game of timing the end game.)
I'd never seen its like, though it wouldn't have been possible without the exact right combination of civilizations. (To be fair, though, Kevin waited for that heritage, then leapt at it.)
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Vinci
Date: 2005-08-09 03:05 am (UTC)