GameStorm 2009 - Part IV

The last day of a convention is always pretty slow as people have either worn themselves out, or leave early to get home for work the next day. We still had Candy's copy of A Castle for All Seasons, but we couldn't find anyone to play with so we started setting up for a 1 on 1 game of it. As we were setting up, 2 guys walked up and wanted to play, so we got to play a 4 player game (which I prefer). We taught them the game and then played - I tried to use the Stonemason more this time and get some VPs from building. I built the Well (12 cost, 10 vp) early with the Stonemason, and I think I built the big 30 cost building with Bricklayer and hired a 17 cost worker there (planning on scoring 25 for leftover resources). At one point I was going to play Stonemason again, and was looking to see whether I could build the building I wanted, and I said something out loud like "oh wait, I can't do that yet - I have to do something else first," to which Jeremy replied "oh, in that case..." and picked up the card he was going to play. I figured he was going to play Master Builder, and thought better of it since I'd sort of indicated I wasn't able to build - but I WAS able to build, and I was playing the Stonemason anyway... I played up the "error" as best I could to try and coerce Jeremy into not playing the Master Builder after all, and in the end it worked! he chose to play a Worker. To make matters worse, another player also played Stonemason, and so Jeremy's Worker got raped for resources - he ended up with $2 and a wood instead of Wood, Stone, and Clay! I won that game by a landslide, pulling off a couple good Master Builder turns as well.

After that we ran into DJ again, and he had 2 friends with him. We looked in the Library for a 5 player game, but couldn't find anything we wanted to play. DJ had a list of games he wanted try, and we finally settled on Space Alert - which I'd been trying to convince Jeremy to try (even though honestly I didn't love it after BGG.con). I thought I'd remember how to play, but as it turned out I was struggling to remember any specifics about the game. We played the first training simulation (and didn't do very well), then we skipped to the first training mission, and did better but ended up dieing! I think if we tried again we probably could survive at least the training mission, but we decided that was enough of that. Jeremy was more intrigued than he thought he would be, and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. I think we needed to communicate a bit better, as we didn't seem to have a handle on who was doing what or when - and that's really the whole game.

Rick was running his prototype of Hammer & Spike with the 4 train gamers that had been recruited and scheduled for that time, so I started watching that. DJ and his friends wanted to play A Castle For All Seasons, so Jeremy played that with them while I went back and forth watching Hammer & Spike and Castle for All Seasons, and as soon as H&S was done Rick was going to play one of my prototypes. I wanted to test the new version of Winds of Fate, but I felt it would be more responsible to test Terra Prime at the moment, so I chose that.

It turned out both of those games finished at about the same time, and we couldn't find anyone else to play Terra Prime, so Jeremy, Rick, and I played it. It went pretty well - though Jeremy found a double alien, and instead of running away (as I advised), he moved alongside them and into an asteroid field. He ended up taking a ton of damage and losing all of his modules... this was a pretty big setback. Rick set up nicely (maybe too nicely) for delivering, buying 2 Cargo Holds, the Cargo Capacity upgrade, and the Government Contract upgrade. The problem was that the delivery tiles only had a few Blue spaces, and the first three colonies made were blue - no green. That was partially my fault, as I made the second colony and had the choice between blue and green after Jeremy had chosen blue already. So Rick couldn't deliver all of the blue cubes he was picking up - and he decided to do something else - he started exploring for another place to colonize. By this time Jeremy had made a green colony, and I picked up some green to deliver and finish off tiles. I also picked up a blue and a brown since it was clear I would be able to finish 1 if not both of the tiles needing green (noone else seemed to be trying to - I contend that Rick should have made a B-line to the green colony as soon as Jeremy founded it). I scored a lot of points (21 in total) off of delivery tiles and Government Contract bonuses, and I ended up wining by 20+ points. However, Rick did manage a 21 point turn at the last minute with a deep space colonization which could potentially have ended the game. It didn't, so I got another turn in which I made 16 points myself. If Rick's action had triggered the game end I still would have won, but it would have been by maybe 6 points, a very close game. As it was I won by a healthy amount.

I like the way the early colonies can shape the game... in this case no green colonies, and noone managed a yellow colonies until really late either (which means no yellow tiles for extra delivering, and no engines for extra movement).

By this time people were pretty much all gone, so Jeremy an I left to convention. It was time for dinner, and we met up at Old Chicago with a frisbee friend of mine that just moved to Portland. I had a really good time all weekend, and tomorrow at noon I'm on my way home. I'm sure Evie will be happy to see me!

GameStorm 2009 - Part III

Planning on getting up early-ish to get to the convention and start gaming is all well and good, but when you go to sleep at like 5 or 6 in the morning, it's not surprising that you wake up at 10:30 :/ When I got out of the shower and was ready to face the world, I found that Jeremy had also just barely rolled out of bed.

We got to the convention in time to secure a copy of Battlestar Galactica and meet Julie and Peter (and a friend of theirs) at the prearrange 1:00. Sadly, it was probably close to 2:00 before we started with the rules explanation, and then a very slow game which finally ended after 6:00! That was the longest game of BSG I've ever played, and that includes the 6 player learning game at BGG.con!

After BSG we went upstairs to the video game room because Jeremy wanted to play in the Rock Band tournament. I played a few rounds of Street Fighter 4 (man it's been a long time!), then headed down to play Jeff's prototype Rune Wars. It's a combat game like Nexus Ops or maybe the Warcraft board game with a cool system of unit building and resources, heavily influenced by Magic: the Gathering.

In Rune Wars you start each turn by collecting a VP for each City you control, then you get to draw a card and can choose which color from the 5 different decks. Each color can let you make units of that color/type, give your armies containing that color unit a special ability, and contains cards which have effects that are in tune with that color's theme. Then you get a chance to play a card or else draw another one, move your units around the board, resolve any conflicts, play another card if you like, and then recruit and promote units. You also gain 1vp for defeating an army with at least 3 units in it, and for gaining control of a city (?), and the game ends when someone scores their 11th vp. I liked the mechanics for card drawing, card playing, card duration (the cards sort of age over time and go away), and unit creation, but the game itself isn't really my kind of game.

After the playtest I called Candy to see where she was, and if she wanted to play Castle For All Seasons... she was in her room getting ready for bed, but she said we could borrow the game, which was awesome of her. Jeremy and I wanted to play that again all day but hadn't been able to.

While looking for someone to play CfaS with I found Jennifer, and she was on her way to play Times Up! Title Recall. They had room for more players, so Jeremy and I jumped into that. I had hoped we could be on the same team, but I ended up on a team with a girl from Romania - that was a challenge because she wasn't as familiar with American pop culture... but we did well, tied for 2nd, only 5 points behind Jeremy's team in the end.

Finally, after the Times Up game we found someone to play Castle For All Seasons with us. It was Lynette, who had played Lost Adventures at BGG.con a year ago. We played a 3 player game, and I tried a Trader/Master Builder/Trader opening, and immediately wished I'd played Messenger or a worker in round 2 and then Master Builder in round 3 instead because I realized I didn't want to trader again in turn 3 (which was the reason I played MB round 2, obviously). It was a bad start, but I managed to time a Master builder or 2 well and got some free points that way. I ended up 2nd (barely) to Lynette, who won by 10 points over me.

I'm starting to worry that CfaS mostly comes down to luck - if someone plays or doesn't play a Master builder, or if people build anyway when 1 player plays Master Builder, then they seem to get a really big advantage. I'm wondering if there's a winning strategy that involves simply Master Buildering almost every turn... if so, that would be lame. Of course you probably wouldn't do it EVERY turn, and you'd probably want to build a building here or there so you could get a helper in the castle (probably on the 'unbuilt buildings' space, since your MB might discourage players from building a lot). These are the things I think about when I play a new game...

GameStorm 2009 - Part II

Slept in a little this morning, and then Jeremy and I headed back to the convention. We both wanted to play Castle For All Seasons again, and maybe Battlestar Galactica if we could. We didn't end up playing either.

Today (Friday) we played the following:

Hammer & Spike, Rick's new train game, with Rick and his mother in law Joan. I'd heard a little about this at BGDF and on his blog, and I was excited to try it. Hammer & Spike (affectionately known as Rickety Rails) is a train game where you build connections and deliver resource cubes, like Railroad Tycoon (and in fact inspired by RRT). The cool bits are that your deliveries are limited by "fuel." Your train can only go 3 cities before having to refuel. Players can build fueling depots, and you can use fuel from your own station for free, or pay an opponent $2 to fuel up at their depot, in order to move another three cities. The other neat thing about the game is that the cities (of which there are 6, the rest are towns) have a variable demand. There are 4 colors of resources, and when you deliver one to a city, the city decides it now wants a different color. On top of that, a big point-getter is a "switchyard," which can be built at a city, but not until you've delivered 1 of each colored resource to that city. The effect this has on the game is very big, and very good.

I could go on about this game, I liked it very much. I couldn't think of much to make it better - I did suggest a small change to how replenishing cubes works - (since it helps all other players, it hurts to have to pay money to do it), and we all agreed the game does not end soon enough (you play for 20 turns, when it should probably end after 15 or 16). I would happily play this again, but I don't know if I will this weekend or not. I hope Rick will send me a copy to play with Michael - who knows, maybe Tasty Minstrel Games* will want to publish it!

* more on Tasty Minstrel Games later

We went to the hospitality room and got some hot dogs for lunch, then Jeremy and I found Jennifer and we decided to play Brass. Just as I was finishing up explaining the rules to Jeremy, Rick returned from showing his prototype to some group of industry people, and he jumped in as well.

I noticed in this game that while 2 people were building Cotton Mills for early income, both of them were also building ports to ship them through instead of using the external market. For the record, the players doing so were Rick and Jennifer, each of whom had played at least once before. I shat out Coal mines like it was going out of style (Developed the first one away turn 1, then built 2 level 2 coal on turn 2). Jeremy did the same, sadly trumping one of my placements positionally. Due to this, I did not get to flip either mine before the Canal phase ended. Jeremy built a boat, and I built 3 level 2 Cotton Mills and shipped them all through the foreign market.

In the second half of the game, I got all the boat building cards, and Jeremy didn't... so we sort of swapped strategies. I ended up building *2* boats in the Rail era, and he built 1. I also built a lot of Coal and Iron, doubling up my action 2 or 3 times during the game. I don't think I built even 1 level 3 Cotton Mill, which was originally going to be my strategy - this is mostly because Rick ate up the foreign demand.

In the end, I scored 157 points while 2nd place (Jennifer) had 98. Jeremy was close behind her, and Rick was not too far back from them. I'll note that every tile Rick built in the Canal era came off the board - he didn't build any level 2 tiles at all in the first half of the game.

I continue to really like Brass. I am more experienced than my opponents were, so it follows that I was able to win, but I didn't think I was going to have that many points!

To pass some time, Jeremy and I played a little Magic variant called Magic War. It's sort of like a cross between Magic: the Gathering and War - the object is to get all of the cards from a common deck, and you don't need to pay the casting cost for anything (there are no land cards, you just assume you have infinite lands). It's fun, and not a little ridiculous :)

Finally, Rick and company invited us to play a 6 player game of Railroad Tycoon with his wife, her mom, and Candy. I had an excellent start, taking 3 or 4 shares on the first turn to secure the first delivery along with a service bounty, then soon after scoring the first 3-link delivery (3 more shares to upgrade my train). I got up to $10k and was ready to upgrade to level 4 for the 4 point bonus as soon as anyone challenged for that, and then something kinda bad happened. Rick's wife Helen built into Chicago when I didn't expect her to, but it was 4/5ths of a long rout to another city. I really wanted to build there, and worse if she finished the route I would have been cut off from a lot of stuff I thought I'd need, so I built to her destination to block her and help myself. So she used her next action to finish her track, but it cost her an extra $4k... this was just the beginning of a Big Mess in the Midwest, as Helen's mom really wanted to build into Chicago as well, and Candy was already sharing the Midwest with me. Thousands of dollars later, all that remained was a tangled mass of track. I had made Helen pay out the nose for her Boston-Toledo connection, and though I thought she might have been going for New York-Chicago (that card didn't come up) or New York-Kansas (which did), she ended up getting neither. It's possible hat my aggressive play lost me the game, though I think another major contributor was when I looked at the number of empty city markers left and saw a decent sized pile (maybe 7), so I thought the game had a couple turns to go, and I used an action to make a New City, only to find out immediately after that there were 3 or 4 empty cities on the board which hadn't been marked yet! This meant the game end was likely to trigger THIS round, and that being the case I would definitely not have wasted my time with the New City - I would have built track to some deliverable cubes, and I would have scored my 6-point Tycoon card in the process. Instead I lost by 10 points :/

I hate when that happens - when I make a significant game decision based on misinformation... especially when I specifically check on that information. I need to learn to be more careful - I should have looked at the board to see that the leftover empty city markers were accurate... those things get missed all the time.

After that game it was getting close to midnight. Jeremy and I found the Werewolf room and were waiting for that to start, but then decided we should head home and get something to eat. I had hoped to get to bed early-ish and then return to the con earlier tomorrow, but here I am now - 2 hours of Magic War and 2 more hours of Internet later... oh well - best laid plans and all that. Before we left I saw Julie and Peter and made plans with them to play Battlestar Galactica at 1:00 tomorrow afternoon. Hopefully we will play A Castle For All Seasons before that, and my prototypes afterwards - we'll see how that goes.

GameStorm 2009

I got to Portland yesterday to hang out with my friends Jeremy and Amelia, and to go to GameStorm. Today we played some Dominion and Rock Band then Jeremy and I headed over to the convention. I was bummed that there wouldn't be a Protospiel this time, but when we got there I found out there was a different, related thing called Game Lab. I hadn't heard of this, but evidently there will be some demo-ing and playtesting going on. I brought Winds of Fate, Terra Prime, Homesteaders, and Brain Freeze, and I think I'll try and get some of them played. In particular TP and WoF.

Today (Thursday) we played the following:

A Castle For All Seasons, with Rick and Candy from the bay area. I've been wanting to play this game for a while now, especially since my friend mike got it in the mail - but he's never available anymore and so hasn't brought it over yet. We finally got to play it today, and it was pretty cool. A little less intuitive to play than I'd hoped, but seemed pretty good... Jeremy and I both wanted to play it some more, but couldn't find another copy all day!

Afterward Rick showed me his new rail game, which looks cool. I hope to play it tomorrow. Then he and Helen went to get dinner and go to bed.

Agricola with Jeff (who we met last year at this convention). Jeremy had played once before, and Jeff had never played. It was an interesting game, and in the end Jeff finished with 36 points, maxing out his fields, grain, and vegetables. He didn't get a third family member until round 13 (another round 14 for the 3 points). I've never seen anyone score so well only having 2 people for that long! Jeremy finished with 39 points. I pulled out the win with just over 40 owing mostly to the Wet Nurse. I baked a ton of bread, finishing with 10 grain and 12 food leftover!

Street Fighter 4 on PS3. We went upstairs and checked out the video game room. Some guy was playing Super Mario Brothers 3 on an old school NES - I couldn't believe hos ghetto it looked! I remember it looking better than that, but I guess that's because nothing at the time looked a lot better. now it looks old and terrible. I played a couple rounds of Street Fighter 4 against some guy - I got crushed the first game, then owned him the second. Then we went to get some dinner.

On a related note, it sounds so funny when they say a value meal is on sale for $4, and then when you order it they say "$4 please." Not $5.34, but $4... no sales tax!

Hamburgum with DJ (a nice guy we met tonight). I'm really not all that good at this game, but I continue to like it. Jeremy boxed me out of most of the board by building - I could have avoided that, but didn't notice. In order to build more buildings I then had to complete a church, which took a lot of work and a lot of money. I ended up dead last, while Jeremy had a good game and crushed us with 109 vps - 15 points ahead of me. I was dead last.

Homesteaders with Jennifer, a woman who's played some of my prototypes at BGG.con and liked them. I narrowly beat out Jeremy 58-52. We were all a little Action light, I spend many of my Actions selling cubes for money and VPs.

Winds of Fate, revisited

Odysseus: Winds of Fate was originally to be about "betting" on whether Odysseus and his crew would make it safely to Ithaca or not, then trying to influence his voyage to the outcome you bet on. I have been unhappy with how my first draft of the game ended up representing that, while I liked some of the ideas, it just didn't come together right. As a result, it's sat un-played and un-thought about for well over a year now.

Recently I realized that I actually had much of the game prototyped, and that I should take the upcoming Protospiel opportunities to maybe try it out again. It might be easier than trying to get together copies of Hot and Fresh or Dynasty, which require more prototyping before they can be played at all.

Today I put a little thought into making the game more directly about betting on the outcome and then influencing the outcome, and I think I like what I came up with.

Originally there were going to be 2 types of 'coins' or scoring chits, and you would win them by "winning" an adventure - you'd get White ones if the adventure outcome was favorable for Odysseus and you'd get Blue ones if it was not. White and Blue represented Athena, who hopes to help Odysseus return home, and Poseidon, who hates Odysseus and wants to see him drown. Players would collect coins in these colors, and depending on the outcome of the game - Success or Failure - only 1 of the colors would score. Or maybe 1 color would score more than the other.

I liked this mechanic so much that I also tried it for All For One briefly - King points and Cardinal points, and the ones that counted depended on which pool ran out first. One problem with the mechanic in both games was that it seemed too "all or nothing" - you could put a lot of work into collecting blue points, and if the game end is White, your efforts turn out to have been worthless. No one liked that very much. Also, it didn't correctly reflect an investment in or betting on the outcome, so it was failing the initial design goal anyway.

The latest idea modifies these White and Blue coins a bit. Instead, there could be coins with Athena on one side and Poseidon on the other. When finishing an Adventure, players would "win" some number of these coins (depending on their performance), and of their reward they could bank a certain maximum amount toward a Successful outcome and a certain maximum amount toward a Failure outcome - basically investing in the game end. They could also withhold some of the coins to be spent during the game, presumably to influence the outcome. Ideally, if you thought the outcome would be Success, you'd always invest the maximum possible into "Success," and you'd withhold some or all of the coins you could have invested in "Failure" to spend trying to influence the game toward a successful outcome.

Originally, the game had cards, and you would play these cards to try and influence which of 2 paths the boat takes each round. Then you would play these cards to influence the outcome of the adventure, which would have an effect on the overall outcome of the game. Now I think the path choice will be based on a blind bid using these coins. I think players will also buy more cards with these coins. Then the card play could work as before (similar to card play in Taj Mahal), with the rewards being coins... more for the 'winner' and fewer for 2nd/3rd place, etc.

At the game end, players will score for all banked coins, where the coins invested in the 'correct' outcome will score a return of 1 coin for every 3 invested - in other words coins in the 'right' bank will be worth 1.33 points while coins banked toward the 'wrong' outcome will only be worth 1 point each.

I think this better represents an investment into the game outcome and then influencing the outcome. I also like the decision of whether to bank the coins for points, or keep them to buy more cards or influence the path of the boat and thereby the Fate of Odysseus.

I'd like to go through the Encounter tiles I made and modify the events that occur, and maybe the powers on the cards that exist. Some will have to be changed to work with this new structure - others could stand to be more fun or interesting. Hopefully I can get this done in the next couple of weeks so I can actually play the game at Protospiel West when i go to GameStorm at the end of the month!