Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Reviews of Games Played past
Ok, so we have been having irregularly held gaming sessions, both at work and at Borders/Barnes & Noble for a little while now. The two formal "all-day Saturday" sessions were great, but I didn't start this blog until after Round 2. I posted about Round 2, but I didn't get the chance to review the games played in Round 1, so I will do it here.
In Round 1, Sridhar, Vish and I all met at Borders for what turned out to be a lengthy gaming session - 8+ hours! The tables were nice and long and well-suite for board games. The staff were actually somewhat excited to see us, and one even told me he thought that it was "very cool" that we were parking our gaming butts there all day.
The games we played are as follows:
Carcassonne
Settlers of Catan
Clans
Kung Fu Samurai on Giant Robot Island
Robo Rally
Carcassonne
Carcassonne is a very popular tile-laying game. Each tile contains fields, roads, buildings, or building parts in the base set. Players connect like to like, sort of like dominos. The strategy here is that each player is given a small number of tokens, called "meeple," which can be used to claim farms/fields, cathedrals, sections of buildings, or roads, and the players have to determine what to claim and whether they want to try to "steal" an already-claimed item by merging with it later on. This is accomplished by starting a new building, road, or farm, laying claim to it and then placing tiles that then connect their claimed section to another player's claim. The player with the most meeple on an item when it is completed gets the points.
We play with several expansions at this point, including Carcassonne: Inns and Cathedrals (formerly known as Carssonne: The Expansion), Carcassonne: Traders and Builders, Carcassonne: The River (which comes with the basic game now), Carcassonne: The River II, Carcassonne: The Count of Carcassonne, Carcassone: King and Scout, Carcassonne: The Princess and The Dragon, and Carcassonne: The Tower.
Inns and Cathedrals brings many additional tiles to the game, some in configurations that are otherwise missing. The River expansions provide alternate starting tiles, introducing a river into the geography. The Count of Carcassonne also provides an alternate starting mechanism by providing a keep with various components as the
starting area. The keep contains representatives of each of the sorts of board elements and a special Count meeple who adds points to finished items when he sits on them in the keep. King and Scout adds point-scoring enhancements for the largest castle and the longest road, but not much else.
The other expansions actually introduce changes to scoring and additional rules or actions that can be taken. Traders and Builders adds resources to the mix, awarding players with the largest number of resources claimed (claimed by finishing a castle containing the resources, regardless of castle ownership) a 10 point bonus per resource type. This can radically affect the final outcome.
The Tower introduces a new board element, the tower, which can be used to remove previously placed meeple from the board, taking them prisoner. Towers reach farther afield as they are built higher, and towers are not owned, so any player can build a tower higher unless the tower is claimed by another player, which requires using one of their precious meeple to claim it. Prisoners can only be returned via prisoner exchanges, which means that the already limited supply of meeple can become even more limited and difficult to manage. This also alters strategy significantly, since large buildings become even more dangerous an undertaking.
The Princess and The Dragon also wreaks havoc with the board by introducing a dragon meeple which is activated from time to time during the game, killing off meeple in its path. The only protection that meeple have is The Princess. This benevolent fairy can only be moved to protect a meeple when a player plays a tile which helps an opponent but does not help the placing player.
Carcassonne has a very high replay value, especially given the large number of expansions available. Combinations of expansions can be used to alter the game, changing rules, lengthening the gameplay, and generally to keep players on their toes. It's no wonder this game has been so successful.
I rate Carcassonne (and all expansions) an amalgamated 4.5 out of 5 pawns
Settlers of Catan
Settlers of Catan is another wildly popular German board game that has become very popular here in the States. Settlers has some expansions available, but as of this writing we have not yet played with any of the expansions in the group. Settlers of Catan is a collect resources and develop type of game. Each player starts off with two towns and one road attached to each town. Towns are placed at the intersections of three of the hexagonal board pieces and roads are placed between two hexes where the sides join.
One of the nice things about Settlers is that the game board is not fixed. Tiles can be placed in virtually any arrangement, though some configurations make for better gameplay than others.
Numbers are places in the center of each tile, designating which total of the dice rolled will signify that a town or city will produce the resource type of that hex. Since towns and cities touch three hexes each, that means that three different scores (if the game is configured that way - it's possible that the same number could be used in all three hexes - like I said before, some configurations are more playable than others) will bring in resources to that city or town.
Cities produce twice the number of resources as towns, and are worth more victory points than towns also. There are also a limited number of towns, cities, and road segments that can be built. for each player. Points are scored for towns (1 each), cities (2 each), having the longest road (2 points), and having the largest army (2 points). Armies are created through the purchase of Development Cards. These cards may grant special actions, such as the ability to place two road segments or steal all of a particular resource card from all the other players, or point, in the case of certain buildings, or they may be soldiers. A soldier card may be played during the player's turn, which gives the player the ability to move the Robber, which allows the player to steal a resource card from any player whose town or city borders the new home of the Robber. The Robber also denies resource production to the adjoining towns and cities. Once a player has played a minimum number of soldiers, the Largest Army card is given to that player. The only way to take the Largest Army card (and its associated 2 point bounty) away from a player is to develop a bigger army.
Once play begins, cities begin to produce resources. Lest a player be caught in a strategically unfortunate board position, permanently only able to produce a single type of resource, players are allowed to trade 4 of any resource type for 1 of any other type. This allows some flexibility in the placement of towns and cities.
Settlers was a fun game. We didn't quite follow some of the rules initially, especially with respect to whether or not to keep our resources private, but we had fun nonetheless. Once you have a board configuration you like, and once you know how the play progresses, the game moves fairly quickly. The board configuration can make a HUGE difference in the overall fairness of the play. If the player who goes first snags the only section with commonly rolled numbers (6, 8, etc.) the rest may be at significant disadvantage. Luckily there are many board configuration suggestions available out on the web.
I give Settlers of Catan 4 out of 5 pawns
Clans
Clans is a game that fails to fit the pattern of most games I have played. There is only one way to move - move all of the pieces from one board space to another occupied board space. That's it. That's the only move. It's hard to believe that the game has much replay value when it only has a single move. It's hard to believe, until you understand that the colors being played by each player are not revealed until the game is over. Now, the savvy player will be able to figure out which player is what color by paying attention to how the others move, but equally savvy players will do their best to obscure their color in the moves they make.
The board contains a number of different terrain types, each initally occupied by a single game piece, or tribe. Once play begins, players move all pieces from one territory to an adjacent,
occupied territory. Once a move leaves a territory surrounded by empty territories, a village is formed, and points are scored for each resident tribe member (3 reds and a blue will score 3 for red and 1 for blue). Villages which are formed on favorable territory types (varies by epoch, which proceed based upon the number of villages formed) gain additional points. Villages formed on territories that are unfavorable for the current epoch score nothing. Whenever a village is formed, however, the forming player takes a token from the epoch counter (which is how epochs progress) and retains it - each token scores an additional point at the end of the game for that player.
We played several games of Clans. For some it was difficult to remember to pay attention to territory types and epochs, and especially to plan ahead for when epochs changed. For others it was difficult to determine who was playing which color, since all colors are represented regardless of the number of players. At least once, the winner was a color not owned by any of the players. Replay value of Clans is quite high, almost addictive at times.
I rate Clans 3.5 out of 5 pawns
Kung-Fu Samurai on Giant Robot Island
Kung Fu Samurai on Giant Robot Island is a card game from Z-Man games. It's one of the follow-on games or expansions for Grave Robbers from Outer Space. Essentially these are like collectable card games, but you don't have to collect the cards. You get every card in the series on the box when you buy it. You have character cards, location cards, monster cards, prop cards, and secial effects cards. The goal is to build a B-grade movie. This is a game that is much more fun if the players are friends and don't really take the gameplay seriously.
Once a movie has characters, it can be attacked by another player playing a monster. Monsters have a much higher attack strength than most characters have defense strength, but then movies may only be attacked by one monster at a time (most of the time - special effects change pretty much any of the rules, depending on the card) but may have multiple characters, which, in turn, may have multiple props (unless they may not use props - again depends on the card).
In general the attacking, defending, and movie-building is secondary to the silliness of the B-movie dialogue lines printed on every card. A successful game is one in which fans of the particular genre of B-movie have a cavorting time attacking one another with silly combinations of cards while reading out and potentially acting out the silly dialogue as well. Thankfully, several of my felow gamers fit this description and Kung Fu Samurai on Giant Robot Island is nealry always fun.
I rate Kung Fu Samurai on Giant Robot Island 3 out of 5 pawns
Robo Rally
Robo Rally is a game I discovered almost too late. The first time I had the opportunity to play it, it (along with most of its expansions) was already out of print. Thanks to eBay, however, I was able to spend far too much money and acquire a shrink-wrapped copy of Robo Rally from Wizards of the Coast. A little over a year and a half later, Robo Rally is again available in stores, though the new edition is made by Avalon Hill (which Wizards of the Coast owns).
Robo Rally is a race game. It certainly doesn't seem like it during each turn, but make no mistake, it's a race. Each player is in charge of programming a robot to move around the playing area, avoiding damaging board elements such as flame throwers, pits, and lasers in order to stop at all the checkpoints and reach the final checkpoint before their competitors. The way robots move is determined by movement cards which are drawn from a deck before each round. Each
round has five movement turns, and each turn has three distinct movement phases, in order to determine whether the robot moves, the board moves, or robots fire at one another before or after a wall or robot or hazard is or is not in the way.
Along the way, there are repair stations where robots can heal inflicted damage and potentially install upgrades (option cards grant special abilities). Each player starts with three robots, each with 9 health points. Each programmer only receives as many movement cards as the robot has remaining health points, so a damaged robot is less flexible to program. Once damage reaches 5 points, movement registers become locked. When this happens, the last instruction that was entered is repeated for that register until the robot is repaired, or more likely, destroyed.
There are several expansions for Robo Rally. We have not yet used any of them, but since I do have both the Wizards and the Avalon Hill editions of the game, we have used game boards from both. Games tend to take a lot of time, especially for newcomers, since you may have to explain in detail why their robot was not facing the way they thought it would be and why that resulted in damage or destruction.
I rate Robo Rally 4 out of 5 pawns
In Round 1, Sridhar, Vish and I all met at Borders for what turned out to be a lengthy gaming session - 8+ hours! The tables were nice and long and well-suite for board games. The staff were actually somewhat excited to see us, and one even told me he thought that it was "very cool" that we were parking our gaming butts there all day.
The games we played are as follows:
Carcassonne
Settlers of Catan
Clans
Kung Fu Samurai on Giant Robot Island
Robo Rally
Carcassonne
Carcassonne is a very popular tile-laying game. Each tile contains fields, roads, buildings, or building parts in the base set. Players connect like to like, sort of like dominos. The strategy here is that each player is given a small number of tokens, called "meeple," which can be used to claim farms/fields, cathedrals, sections of buildings, or roads, and the players have to determine what to claim and whether they want to try to "steal" an already-claimed item by merging with it later on. This is accomplished by starting a new building, road, or farm, laying claim to it and then placing tiles that then connect their claimed section to another player's claim. The player with the most meeple on an item when it is completed gets the points.
We play with several expansions at this point, including Carcassonne: Inns and Cathedrals (formerly known as Carssonne: The Expansion), Carcassonne: Traders and Builders, Carcassonne: The River (which comes with the basic game now), Carcassonne: The River II, Carcassonne: The Count of Carcassonne, Carcassone: King and Scout, Carcassonne: The Princess and The Dragon, and Carcassonne: The Tower.
Inns and Cathedrals brings many additional tiles to the game, some in configurations that are otherwise missing. The River expansions provide alternate starting tiles, introducing a river into the geography. The Count of Carcassonne also provides an alternate starting mechanism by providing a keep with various components as the
starting area. The keep contains representatives of each of the sorts of board elements and a special Count meeple who adds points to finished items when he sits on them in the keep. King and Scout adds point-scoring enhancements for the largest castle and the longest road, but not much else.The other expansions actually introduce changes to scoring and additional rules or actions that can be taken. Traders and Builders adds resources to the mix, awarding players with the largest number of resources claimed (claimed by finishing a castle containing the resources, regardless of castle ownership) a 10 point bonus per resource type. This can radically affect the final outcome.
The Tower introduces a new board element, the tower, which can be used to remove previously placed meeple from the board, taking them prisoner. Towers reach farther afield as they are built higher, and towers are not owned, so any player can build a tower higher unless the tower is claimed by another player, which requires using one of their precious meeple to claim it. Prisoners can only be returned via prisoner exchanges, which means that the already limited supply of meeple can become even more limited and difficult to manage. This also alters strategy significantly, since large buildings become even more dangerous an undertaking.
The Princess and The Dragon also wreaks havoc with the board by introducing a dragon meeple which is activated from time to time during the game, killing off meeple in its path. The only protection that meeple have is The Princess. This benevolent fairy can only be moved to protect a meeple when a player plays a tile which helps an opponent but does not help the placing player.
Carcassonne has a very high replay value, especially given the large number of expansions available. Combinations of expansions can be used to alter the game, changing rules, lengthening the gameplay, and generally to keep players on their toes. It's no wonder this game has been so successful.
I rate Carcassonne (and all expansions) an amalgamated 4.5 out of 5 pawns
Settlers of Catan
Settlers of Catan is another wildly popular German board game that has become very popular here in the States. Settlers has some expansions available, but as of this writing we have not yet played with any of the expansions in the group. Settlers of Catan is a collect resources and develop type of game. Each player starts off with two towns and one road attached to each town. Towns are placed at the intersections of three of the hexagonal board pieces and roads are placed between two hexes where the sides join.
One of the nice things about Settlers is that the game board is not fixed. Tiles can be placed in virtually any arrangement, though some configurations make for better gameplay than others.
Numbers are places in the center of each tile, designating which total of the dice rolled will signify that a town or city will produce the resource type of that hex. Since towns and cities touch three hexes each, that means that three different scores (if the game is configured that way - it's possible that the same number could be used in all three hexes - like I said before, some configurations are more playable than others) will bring in resources to that city or town.Cities produce twice the number of resources as towns, and are worth more victory points than towns also. There are also a limited number of towns, cities, and road segments that can be built. for each player. Points are scored for towns (1 each), cities (2 each), having the longest road (2 points), and having the largest army (2 points). Armies are created through the purchase of Development Cards. These cards may grant special actions, such as the ability to place two road segments or steal all of a particular resource card from all the other players, or point, in the case of certain buildings, or they may be soldiers. A soldier card may be played during the player's turn, which gives the player the ability to move the Robber, which allows the player to steal a resource card from any player whose town or city borders the new home of the Robber. The Robber also denies resource production to the adjoining towns and cities. Once a player has played a minimum number of soldiers, the Largest Army card is given to that player. The only way to take the Largest Army card (and its associated 2 point bounty) away from a player is to develop a bigger army.
Once play begins, cities begin to produce resources. Lest a player be caught in a strategically unfortunate board position, permanently only able to produce a single type of resource, players are allowed to trade 4 of any resource type for 1 of any other type. This allows some flexibility in the placement of towns and cities.
Settlers was a fun game. We didn't quite follow some of the rules initially, especially with respect to whether or not to keep our resources private, but we had fun nonetheless. Once you have a board configuration you like, and once you know how the play progresses, the game moves fairly quickly. The board configuration can make a HUGE difference in the overall fairness of the play. If the player who goes first snags the only section with commonly rolled numbers (6, 8, etc.) the rest may be at significant disadvantage. Luckily there are many board configuration suggestions available out on the web.
I give Settlers of Catan 4 out of 5 pawns
Clans
Clans is a game that fails to fit the pattern of most games I have played. There is only one way to move - move all of the pieces from one board space to another occupied board space. That's it. That's the only move. It's hard to believe that the game has much replay value when it only has a single move. It's hard to believe, until you understand that the colors being played by each player are not revealed until the game is over. Now, the savvy player will be able to figure out which player is what color by paying attention to how the others move, but equally savvy players will do their best to obscure their color in the moves they make.
The board contains a number of different terrain types, each initally occupied by a single game piece, or tribe. Once play begins, players move all pieces from one territory to an adjacent,
occupied territory. Once a move leaves a territory surrounded by empty territories, a village is formed, and points are scored for each resident tribe member (3 reds and a blue will score 3 for red and 1 for blue). Villages which are formed on favorable territory types (varies by epoch, which proceed based upon the number of villages formed) gain additional points. Villages formed on territories that are unfavorable for the current epoch score nothing. Whenever a village is formed, however, the forming player takes a token from the epoch counter (which is how epochs progress) and retains it - each token scores an additional point at the end of the game for that player.We played several games of Clans. For some it was difficult to remember to pay attention to territory types and epochs, and especially to plan ahead for when epochs changed. For others it was difficult to determine who was playing which color, since all colors are represented regardless of the number of players. At least once, the winner was a color not owned by any of the players. Replay value of Clans is quite high, almost addictive at times.
I rate Clans 3.5 out of 5 pawns
Kung-Fu Samurai on Giant Robot Island
Kung Fu Samurai on Giant Robot Island is a card game from Z-Man games. It's one of the follow-on games or expansions for Grave Robbers from Outer Space. Essentially these are like collectable card games, but you don't have to collect the cards. You get every card in the series on the box when you buy it. You have character cards, location cards, monster cards, prop cards, and secial effects cards. The goal is to build a B-grade movie. This is a game that is much more fun if the players are friends and don't really take the gameplay seriously.
Once a movie has characters, it can be attacked by another player playing a monster. Monsters have a much higher attack strength than most characters have defense strength, but then movies may only be attacked by one monster at a time (most of the time - special effects change pretty much any of the rules, depending on the card) but may have multiple characters, which, in turn, may have multiple props (unless they may not use props - again depends on the card).In general the attacking, defending, and movie-building is secondary to the silliness of the B-movie dialogue lines printed on every card. A successful game is one in which fans of the particular genre of B-movie have a cavorting time attacking one another with silly combinations of cards while reading out and potentially acting out the silly dialogue as well. Thankfully, several of my felow gamers fit this description and Kung Fu Samurai on Giant Robot Island is nealry always fun.
I rate Kung Fu Samurai on Giant Robot Island 3 out of 5 pawns
Robo Rally
Robo Rally is a game I discovered almost too late. The first time I had the opportunity to play it, it (along with most of its expansions) was already out of print. Thanks to eBay, however, I was able to spend far too much money and acquire a shrink-wrapped copy of Robo Rally from Wizards of the Coast. A little over a year and a half later, Robo Rally is again available in stores, though the new edition is made by Avalon Hill (which Wizards of the Coast owns).
Robo Rally is a race game. It certainly doesn't seem like it during each turn, but make no mistake, it's a race. Each player is in charge of programming a robot to move around the playing area, avoiding damaging board elements such as flame throwers, pits, and lasers in order to stop at all the checkpoints and reach the final checkpoint before their competitors. The way robots move is determined by movement cards which are drawn from a deck before each round. Each
round has five movement turns, and each turn has three distinct movement phases, in order to determine whether the robot moves, the board moves, or robots fire at one another before or after a wall or robot or hazard is or is not in the way.Along the way, there are repair stations where robots can heal inflicted damage and potentially install upgrades (option cards grant special abilities). Each player starts with three robots, each with 9 health points. Each programmer only receives as many movement cards as the robot has remaining health points, so a damaged robot is less flexible to program. Once damage reaches 5 points, movement registers become locked. When this happens, the last instruction that was entered is repeated for that register until the robot is repaired, or more likely, destroyed.
There are several expansions for Robo Rally. We have not yet used any of them, but since I do have both the Wizards and the Avalon Hill editions of the game, we have used game boards from both. Games tend to take a lot of time, especially for newcomers, since you may have to explain in detail why their robot was not facing the way they thought it would be and why that resulted in damage or destruction.
I rate Robo Rally 4 out of 5 pawns
