Gaming Nights
Oct. 7th, 2005 10:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aBetween Wednesday & Thursday, I played Lost Valley, Beowulf, The Hollywood Card Game, and Magna Grecia, for a total of three brand new games, and one fairly new game.
Lost Valley is an interesting little resource-management/adventure game. More than anything else, it reminds me of Candamir, one of the few other games to mix these two particular genres. Lost Valley is, however, set in the Old West, where you're off prospecting for gold, and trying to make the biggest haul before the end of the game.
Adventure games don't get a lot of play for me, because I'm generally looking for strategy over experience. However, this is a pretty good example of the genre. It's got some sharp edges and some over-complexities which a good developer could have taken care of. (I seem to be writing that a lot lately.) But it also plays pretty smoothly, has some elegant underlying systems, and beyond that is fun. I'd play this again.
Beowulf was play #3. It continues to be enjoyable and enjoyed by just about everyone who plays. Dave G. specifically requested this play, and I'd been bringing it to EndGame for a couple of weeks and finally managed to connect up with him on Wednesday, which was nice. Annoyingly, I left my rules at the store. Hopefully I'll find that either Dave or the store lost & found ended up with them when I return next week, as it really annoys me to have games missing parts, even if I could replace them by printing a copy.
The Hollywood Card Game mysteriously appeared on my doorstep Thursday (annoying UPS people). I'd been planning another short game to lead off my Thursday night game, but this had a max limit of 4 people, which was our group size last night, so I went with it instead. It's a neat Faidutti & Schacht game, though it feels like a Schacht game, not a Faidutti. You draft cards via a somewhat baroque method, and then put them into sets which are forced closed when you add a star to them. Scoring is simply set size time star value for each set, and you get to value one unclosed set at game end (usually). It reminds me a lot of Coloretto, and it's going to go straight into my great openers pile with Coloretto, King's Breakfast, and For Sale.
Magna Grecia I recently got in a trade for Keythedral. Definitely a good trade. I thought that Keythedral was a complex, yet totally chaotic, mess, while Magna Grecia is a very interesting brain burner. The object is to manage the creation & valuation of markets, through connections between the cities where those markets are located, and also to gain the attention of nearby Oracles. It's like a railroad game, except the valuation of each "station" is based on the number of places that it connects to (a scoring mechanism that I'm not aware of in the true railroad game world).
Gaming on Wednesday was a little strained because Sam, one of the players at EndGame, has decided he's mad at me and doesn't want to play with me. He feels I shut him out of a game a week earlier, and I sort of did, though my main purpose was to get 9 people organized into 2 games, which might have taken the rest of the night if someone didn't step in.
The problem is that Sam is one of the more annoying players at EndGame. He's an extremely slow player and he also has a tendency to start talking about how badly designed a game is if he's losing at it. One of the other players wasn't willing to play with him last week, and so I had to try and organize the two games around that factor, and I ended up taking the blame for it.
Fair enough. I wasn't going to explain that all to him and send him off on another irrational witch-hunt.
The irony of this all? Because Sam feels like I kept him out a game that he wanted to play last week, this week he refused to play a game that he wanted to play because I was in it. Ah, rationality, thy name is not Sam.
I should probably try and mend fences with him, but I was too pissed at his passive aggressive behavior on Wednesday.
Lost Valley is an interesting little resource-management/adventure game. More than anything else, it reminds me of Candamir, one of the few other games to mix these two particular genres. Lost Valley is, however, set in the Old West, where you're off prospecting for gold, and trying to make the biggest haul before the end of the game.
Adventure games don't get a lot of play for me, because I'm generally looking for strategy over experience. However, this is a pretty good example of the genre. It's got some sharp edges and some over-complexities which a good developer could have taken care of. (I seem to be writing that a lot lately.) But it also plays pretty smoothly, has some elegant underlying systems, and beyond that is fun. I'd play this again.
Beowulf was play #3. It continues to be enjoyable and enjoyed by just about everyone who plays. Dave G. specifically requested this play, and I'd been bringing it to EndGame for a couple of weeks and finally managed to connect up with him on Wednesday, which was nice. Annoyingly, I left my rules at the store. Hopefully I'll find that either Dave or the store lost & found ended up with them when I return next week, as it really annoys me to have games missing parts, even if I could replace them by printing a copy.
The Hollywood Card Game mysteriously appeared on my doorstep Thursday (annoying UPS people). I'd been planning another short game to lead off my Thursday night game, but this had a max limit of 4 people, which was our group size last night, so I went with it instead. It's a neat Faidutti & Schacht game, though it feels like a Schacht game, not a Faidutti. You draft cards via a somewhat baroque method, and then put them into sets which are forced closed when you add a star to them. Scoring is simply set size time star value for each set, and you get to value one unclosed set at game end (usually). It reminds me a lot of Coloretto, and it's going to go straight into my great openers pile with Coloretto, King's Breakfast, and For Sale.
Magna Grecia I recently got in a trade for Keythedral. Definitely a good trade. I thought that Keythedral was a complex, yet totally chaotic, mess, while Magna Grecia is a very interesting brain burner. The object is to manage the creation & valuation of markets, through connections between the cities where those markets are located, and also to gain the attention of nearby Oracles. It's like a railroad game, except the valuation of each "station" is based on the number of places that it connects to (a scoring mechanism that I'm not aware of in the true railroad game world).
Gaming on Wednesday was a little strained because Sam, one of the players at EndGame, has decided he's mad at me and doesn't want to play with me. He feels I shut him out of a game a week earlier, and I sort of did, though my main purpose was to get 9 people organized into 2 games, which might have taken the rest of the night if someone didn't step in.
The problem is that Sam is one of the more annoying players at EndGame. He's an extremely slow player and he also has a tendency to start talking about how badly designed a game is if he's losing at it. One of the other players wasn't willing to play with him last week, and so I had to try and organize the two games around that factor, and I ended up taking the blame for it.
Fair enough. I wasn't going to explain that all to him and send him off on another irrational witch-hunt.
The irony of this all? Because Sam feels like I kept him out a game that he wanted to play last week, this week he refused to play a game that he wanted to play because I was in it. Ah, rationality, thy name is not Sam.
I should probably try and mend fences with him, but I was too pissed at his passive aggressive behavior on Wednesday.
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