What can I say?

Too little time, too depressing a climate, too many distractions, too many kids, too many wives, far too many other games, a computer with a modem…

It’s been a long time so, without feeling too guilty, here is the catch-up site update. There have been plenty of games played since the last time I wrote a report, I even remember some of them. A few scraps of paper have gone missing, and as for the dates, well, surely that isn’t important.

On to the games.

At last I managed to get a few plays out of Giganten. This is one of the games destined to remain pure and uncorrupted by the touch of lusting human hands. I could see no reason for its continued virginal status, it had been offered to the congregation on many occasions but there was always some other game which attracted the attention. I have several titles apparently doomed to this gaming nunnery, Die Handler, Vino and Koalition being notable examples. But at least Giganten has now undertaken its rite of passage and can spend the rest of its shelf life smiling enigmatically at its untried neighbours while throwing in the odd blush.

Not only did Giganten manage to make it to the ball, it also made a pretty good impression, getting two plays and a favourable rating.

This was played with one of our irregular groups, consisting of two friends who only manage to make it down to see us once every couple of years or so (I seem to recall that Settlers of Catan was the last game we played, which may explain the prolonged absence). I can’t remember what other games were on offer, but, at last, the prospect of playing a game on Texan oil prospectors seemed the most appealing way to spend an evening.

The game is a classic German style design, with a strict phase-by-phase turn order which sees all the players drill for oil before transporting it back to the depots and then competing for the right to sell the black gold. Each phase is a little sub-game in itself without becoming too unwieldy.

The prospecting bit sees the players drive their trucks around the oil field in a race to get to the best sites. The sites nearest the start line have the least oil, while the ones furthest away have the most. There is also a gambling type of field where you will not know how much you are going to get until you start drilling.

It is a nicely balanced way to play things. You can choose to play safe or go for the high risk-high return strategy.

The transport side also plays a role. Each player uses trains to transport the oil back to the oil depots. The trains run alongside the oilfield and each player owns an engine. In essence, the higher yield oil fields require the players to have advanced their trains further along the tracks. You can force other players to use your train to transport oil if you are the only one with a train far enough along. It is a simple enough mechanic and adds another thing to think about.

Most important is the sales phase. This is where all the hard work is converted into money as the oil that has made it back to storage depots gets sold. There are three depots in all, with evocative enough oil company names. Each depot has its own oil price barometer which can move up and down quite quickly between turns. The trick is that only one player can sell oil from each depot. So there is obviously an incentive to get your oil to the depot paying the highest price, and then earning the right to sell your oil from that depot. The penalties for failing to sell can be quite punishing, as each player can only store a small amount of unsold oil at each depot between turns. A lot of effort and money spent on transporting oil back to the depot can be wasted if you do not earn the right to sell it.

The bidding for sales rights is the central part of the game and is resolved in a straightforward auction. Each player has a hand of sales vouchers with a value of 1 or 2. The hands grow as turns go by, so a quiet player can build up a dominant position in vouchers if he chooses not to bid for a while. Also, of course, if you bid the farm to get rights to one lucrative deal, you can find yourself with no market leverage at all in the rounds that follow. So do you compete for the biggest price, settle for a lesser price depot but hope to hold on to your sales vouchers, or spread your oil around the depots, aiming to conserve your product and wait for another turn?

The auctions can be tense affairs, as befitting the mechanism on which your fate in the game really depends.

The whole sequence is brought together by action cards which determine what a player can do in each turn. Five of these are placed face up at he beginning, and each player chooses one in turn order. Each card will give a number of movement points to be divided between truck and train, a number of sales vouchers to be gained, and a variety of other special actions like extra oil, an influence over the depot prices and the Railtrack option which sees your opponents’ trains moved back along the track.

Essentially, each card is a trade off between movement points and sales vouchers, although the move your opponents’ train back option can be devastating if timed well.

The cards also drive the neutral black train, which acts both as an independent means of oil transport for players who want to avoid paying one of their opponents, and as the game timer. When the black train reaches the end of the track, the game is over and most money wins.

Anyway, Giganten is relatively easy to learn, aided by its pretty easily defined sequence of play. Player interaction is guaranteed, as everyone has something to do in each phase – a feature I really like in my games. The theme works nicely with the mechanics and there is some depth to it, as you try and balance your prospecting, drilling, transporting and sales roles.

Anyway, we played two games in successive evenings, each game lasting the ninety minutes stated on the box, with about twenty minutes explanation time.

The scores

Game 1

Marion 97,500; Ron 62,500; Fiona 59,000, Bill 58,500

Game 2

Marion 112,500; Bill 108,500; Ron 107,500; Fiona 61,000

I don’t remember all the details but the points that stick in the mind include Marion’s clever and not obvious winning strategy and the importance of avoiding bidding wars.

Marion pursued a very conservative drilling strategy, concentrating her prospecting activities around the lower yield sites at the near end of the oil field while the rest of us went in search of the mother lode. Although in doing this Marion sacrificed the ability to count on sites which would produce oil turn after turn, it had the advantage of reducing the need to extend her rail line too far and allowed her to concentrate on action cards which handed out more sales vouchers than movement points. Marion then converted her sales voucher advantage into a money advantage with canny tactical play during the auction phase.

There is no doubting the validity of this strategy – after all, it worked twice – although I suspect it might fall apart if more than one player tries for it (I suspect there are not enough drilling sites to support two low yield producers).

But it is the auction phase where the game is won or lost and in both games Fiona suffered from being forced to choose between exhausting her stock of sales vouchers or losing a stack of oil on a couple of occasions which really made a recovery unlikely. A situation which is likely to occur to at least one player in a four player game I suspect, when you are competing for sales rights in only three companies, of which only one or two will usually be offering a decent price.

Ratings

Marion 9, Bill 7.5, Ron 8, Fiona 9

Good ratings then for a well crafted game. I do have some reservations, however. I suspect its longevity is short. It seems to me to be quite a linear game which will feel pretty familiar each time you play. There are some nasty tricks you can pull in each of the major phases, which is nice, but they are pretty predictable. Also, the meat of the game is concentrated in the sales auctions to the point where activities in the other spheres of the game really are secondary. And here you can get really screwed through no real fault of your own, which is not so nice.

Still, a good game which will be played again I am sure.

We managed a three-player game of Carolus Magnus on one of our regular game nights which turned into a bit of an epic.

This is a clever little abstract game of area control which has taken a single mechanic and milked it for all it is worth. The game is supposed to be based on the campaigns of Charlemagne to create a unified France… whatever, that’s all you need to know about the theme as it has absolutely no resonance in the game.

What you are faced with is a circular distribution of individual bits of cardboard and a load of the ubiquitous little wooden blocks in five colours. These blocks serve a dual purpose, they represent individual knights who belong to the faction of that colour and who can be placed on the bits of cardboard in an attempt to control them, or they can represent influence in that faction. The player with the most blocks in any one colour will control all of that faction’s knights. And this is the central mechanic of the game.

The whole thing moves along like this:

First a big wooden marker hops around the circle of cardboard pieces up to the number of spaces listed on a card each player lays down at the beginning of a round to determine turn order.

On the space the wooden dobber lands the player can, should he control the majority of knights on that space, build one of his castles (replacing another player’s castle if necessary).

If he has castles on adjacent pieces of cardboard, he can amalgamate them into one big piece of cardboard, which become easier to defend.

Then the player rolls a special die which will give him a selection of cubes which he can now place either as knights on the board or as votes in a faction.

The castles are vital. First of all they strengthen a player’s presence in a region, counting as extra knights when determining who has the most influence – which is why amalgamated provinces are easier to defend– also, and most important, the first player to build all of his castles wins the game.

The game involves some tricky decision making over which factions to invest resources in and when to place knights on the board without surrendering them to another player who may gain the majority in that knight’s faction.

You also have to strike when the iron is hot, timing your victory run to coincide with your peaks in influence. Control of a faction can be fleeting and, unless you capitalise when you have the edge, you will often see your position quickly erode as allies turn and castles are replaced.

This was pretty much how our game went, with each of us getting close to a victory but only Federico managing to time his end run well enough to win.

Ratings

Federico 7.5; Ron 8; Bill 7.5

This is a nice game, but it has two drawbacks in my book. First off is the luck element. The dice you roll to gain blocks have a huge influence in what you can do in a turn. A good roll can see you get what you need to control three factions and win the game, while a bad one could see you with a handful of worthless wood. Now I don’t mind a big luck element in the right context but this is the second problem I have with the game, it can drag. We probably played for nigh on 90 minutes which is too long for a game of this weight. At first the proximity to victory and the knowledge that the right roll could earn you the win was pretty tense, after a while though you just wanted to game to end.

I don’t know if this is a general problem with the game or whether our particular run at it was unusual. We have not played it enough to make a balanced judgement.

There are many plus points however. It is a good three player game, of which there are too few examples; for an abstract game it creates a good level of tension; it provides enough to think about without being overwhelmingly taxing and it is quick to learn. If I find out that sessions will usually come in at half the time it took us on this run, my rating would probably go up to an 8, which is more than respectable for a game of this depth.

For the record, this session was finished of with the customary round of Riffifi, which Ron won handily.

The February meeting of the irregulars, which is now becoming regular enough to make this particular sobriquet redundant, went for one of the most critically acclaimed games of last year. Princes of Florence, the product of the A-list design team of Wolfgang Kramer and Richard Ulrich.

Princes is a weird combination of abstract game with a strong theme, but where the theme is so odd that you wonder what on earth these game inventors are putting in their tea. It wouldn’t surprise me to discover that the entire school of German game design is actually run out of one of Amsterdam’s coffee shops, but I digress.

Each player represents a Renaissance Prince whose wealth-cushioned life has become so shallow and meaningless that he has to engage in pissing contests with his fellow scum sucking royals simply to pass the time. So the competition is on to become host and sponsor to the greatest creative and academic minds of the age, basking in the reflected glory of the works of genius produced on the princely estates.

Or something like that.

The game is played in seven rounds, with each round consisting of an auction and a buying segment as each player tries to build up his estate with the most beneficial mix of buildings, landscape features, entertainers, architects and political freedoms. These features will combine to inspire the various creative personalities of the day to produce their best work. Each time a player produces a work it scores points, which can in turn be converted into prestige and money. The player with the most prestige points at the end of the game wins.

In the first phase each player in turn bids for one of several objects, ranging from lakes and parkland to special prestige cards which grant a significant victory point bonus at the end of the game. The trick is that only one of each type of object can be gained per auction. So if player A manages to get hold of an entertainer, nobody else can bid for one until the next turn. Also, each player can only get one thing per round. Once he is successful in outbidding everyone else, he gets what he wants, but is prevented from making any further bids.

The second part of the round, in which each player can perform two actions, is much less cutthroat. It is here that players buy buildings, recruit more artists and academics to their stable of brilliance and produce works.

Each time a player buys a building or landscape feature he places it in his grounds, represented by a square grid printed on one of the boards provided for each player. The grounds are deliberately restrictive, and players must be careful to use the available space as efficiently as possible. The more useful a building, for example, the bigger and more awkwardly shaped it is, making it tricky to fit in between your pretty little lake and the park you thought you had placed in an excellent position.

Churning out the works is the heart of the game. Each personality card lists the type of genius you are dealing with, mathematician, painter, doctor etc. Unfortunately they are all generic, no Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci here, which is a shame. Anyway, each card lists the requirements for a great work. The more requirements a player can meet, the better the work (represented by a Work Number). So a mathematician, for example, could require a park to stroll around while cogitating, a university for study and the freedom of expression for his lectures. (I haven’t got the card in front of me, so I don’t know that this is what the game’s mathematician actually requires, but you get the idea.) Added to this are points which can be gained each time a work is produced – entertainers always add points, as do the number of personality cards possessed by a player – and points which can be added with the play of one-off bonus cards, which can be bought during each player’s turn.

Basically, as the game progresses and players have more features on their estates the higher the potential scores for each work. This is just as well, because as the turns progress, so the minimum score required for a work also rises, which forces players to keep up with the pace.

There is more to it than that, but I can’t be bothered to explain it. You know enough to get the drift.

Essentially it is a puzzle type of game where you are trying to maximise gains from combining a limited number of acquisitions. There are several potential strategies, from the straightforward produce as many works as possible play, to the more left field approaches which use architects and/or entertainers as their cornerstones. There is not much scope for stuffing other players, except during the auction rounds. But even here it is usually so vital to make sure you get something useful for yourself that it precludes too much deliberate nastiness.

This was my third try at this game, the first with five players, and having been burned by trying to be too clever in the past, I decided to stick to a straightforward strategy of getting five works out and trying to meet the conditions of one high scoring prestige card.

It just about worked, as I managed to squeeze Sarah out by a thin four points. I think most of this can be attributed to the fact that I had played before, and knew how useful a couple of entertainers can be. Everyone else had managed to get stuck along the away, usually through being stymied during one of the auction phases, meaning that they couldn’t get that last vital component for the big scoring work.

Final scores

Judith 42; Richard 48; Sara 57; Ron 41; Bill 61

Ratings

Judith 9; Richard 9; Sarah 7; Ron 6; Bill 7.5

So a pretty split vote, with some eulogies and some dead gladiators. I am tending towards the latter I must admit. This in itself is a bit unusual. I am not much of an iconoclast where games are concerned and if there is enough hype around I usually fall for it. But I have missed the wave on this one. Loudly promoted as the game of the year from many of the hobby’s cognoscenti, Princes leaves me a little chilly. It is clever enough, with some nice twists and enough going on to keep the interest levels up. But it is not exactly tension filled and it is pretty dry. 90 minutes of your guests trying to work out various routes to victory with little reason to talk to each other.

Also, and I think I am in a minority of one here, it feels a little unpolished to me. The work number concept is a bit on the clunky side – I am sure a bit of extra design could have reduced the amount of number crunching involved in the game. I know this criticism is a bit much coming from someone who likes Extrablatt but I demand the right to be as inconsistent as I please on my own site.

I don’t like the relationship between work number points, prestige points and money, which I am sure is unnecessarily complex. The artwork is functional rather than eye-catching and there are far too many numbers all over the place. I also think the publishers missed a trick by making the personality cards so generic and uninspiring. It would have been so much nicer to have some real characters on the cards, alongside, perhaps, some potted biographies.

Worst of all, from a game playing angle, I think there is far more luck involved than is immediately apparent in a game which relies so much on numeracy. This lies in the initial deal of personality cards. Basically, if you are dealt a series of cards which combine well together (perhaps they all work out of the same building, or all gain some benefit from a lake) you have a big advantage in the early stages of the game. A few easy purchases here will net decent early returns and also give you the flexibility to go for the flashy extras which can get you the bonus points to win the game.

Anyway, it is a good enough game, and I am sure it will be out again, but I am not a true believer, that’s for sure.

The final report is a short one, from the most recent meeting of the irregulars, and most notable for producing the first ten rating. So a big heavy game then, with lots of bits, a Knizia, Schmiel or a Kramer for sure, and one which combines at ten different subgames, at least one of which could claim to be original…

Funnily enough, no.

Try a light card game, with a ridiculous theme, over in 45 minutes and forgotten in an hour.

Yes it is was the bean trading game which gained the first ultimate accolade. For those of you who don’t know about it, a brief precis follows.

The game is played with a pack of cards made up of several suits of varying length. Each suit represents a variety of bean. Each player is a bean farmer who grows crops of beans in two, or sometimes three rows. He can only play cards of the same variety in each of his rows. If he is forced to play a bean of a different type, he must make room for it by selling the cards he has already grown. The more cards you have managed to grow, the more money you will receive.

The point of the game is to manipulate your cards so that you can keep growing profitable crops. And the way to do this is through trading (or through some incredibly lucky card draws). And that is pretty much it. I won’t bore you with the details of trading or the various restrictions which exist to force you to trade, you already know enough to know whether you will like it or not.

It’s light, it’s fun, it is quite shouty in a silly way and absurd though the theme might be, it works.

We had planned to play it as a light filler to get things going and ended up playing it throughout the evening.

And so it goes…

Ratings

Judith 10 (!); Sarah 6; Richard 7; Ron 7.5; Bill 8

Nothing to say really. It is a good game and it has the potential to really grab you or leave you wishing for less. I rate it as a definite laugh and 8 is probably as high as I would ever go for something this light.

Our regular group did manage a three player game of Aladdin’s Dragons, but it is too soon to put out a report. It was over too quickly although it does have promise. We will wait until we have a five player game before committing ourselves to any ratings. I also managed to introduce Federico to the delights of Lost Cities, which went down well.

Unfortunately, I have lost the details of the other game we played – a four player game of Reiner Knizia’s latest take on an auction theme – Merchants of Amsterdam. I do remember that it went down very well, with high ratings from everyone (8s all round I think).

Still I am confident this will be back on the table soon so I will wait until then before proffering a full review.

Vinci

Vinci

Present: Helen, Alex, Federico, Ron, Bill

Vinci is proving to be a little more resilient than first expected. A less than impressive first play has seen steady improvement over time – the game they couldn’t hang. The decision to play Vinci had been made in advance – Federico was keen to play, having been exposed to some of its positive press. Ron and I were a little better disposed towards it after our second go a month earlier while Helen and Alex were prepared to try again as long as we all made an effort to keep the pace up.

Vinci has done well to get back on the table after its lacklustre debut last year. The first time we tried the game it turned into an endurance test lasting over three hours; an experience which left several of us wishing for a dental appointment. Slow players can mar most games, but their baleful influence is at a peak with titles like Vinci. When there are no joint action phases and you have to do all your stuff-strutting during your turn it can be intensely frustrating while you wait for everyone else to have a go before getting involved again. Particularly if other players are taking three times as long as you in executing the most obvious of moves. This is where games like La Citta score heavily for me, where turns are broken up into smaller phases with no-one waiting too long to do something.

The first time we played Vinci the slow play was probably reflected in the ratings. Tonight we would see how much better the game is without the Prozac.

It did not take long for Helen, Ron and Alex to build up a small but important lead over Federico and myself.

Ron’s ascendancy was short-lived and she was the first to suffer from the hit the leader syndrome, and soon found her southern mining colony cut to ribbons. This would prove to be crucial as Ron had put a lot of effort into establishing her miners in difficult terrain in order to protect a regular haul of declining empire points. In the second game we played this tactic had resulted in a big win for Ron, this time the others got wise and she never really recovered from this mauling. In the three games I now have under my belt it has become obvious how difficult it is to recover from one bad turn when you are forced to put a current empire into decline because it is performing poorly, resulting in a low scoring turn.

Ron was the first to suffer – I was destined to meet the same fate. Still in the chasing pack as we approached the last couple of turns I found myself bereft of scoring opportunities – I had no choice but to fold an empire and advance my marker a meagre two points. There would be no way back for me, either.

Federico had an interesting problem. In the mid-game he invested in what seems to be one of those super civilisations, Medicine + Specialisation – a combination which would see two extra pawns joining in each turn, allowing a potentially huge empire to develop.

In the end, the empire’s success was probably Federico’s undoing. As well as costing victory points to buy in the first place, this tribe of healthy migrants became a very difficult people to abandon. Each turn the civilisation gave Federico just enough scope for expansion to persuade him to carry on with it. It was certainly an impressive sight as his yellow pieces drifted across the board, retaining cohesion and maintaining a good size. Unfortunately, any points for his declining empire were soon a distant memory, having long been absorbed by other civilisations. While he managed to rack up points with the travelling doctors, it was not enough to threaten the leaders.

As the endgame approached it was a two horse race. Helen had contested the lead from the beginning. By maintaining a good scoring rate and unerringly picking the right time to decline, Helen had guaranteed a position from which she would be challenging for line honours. The critical empire for her was probably another load of miners. In the same southern area with adjacent mining symbols and tough terrain which Ron had been flushed out of, Helen managed to flourish.

But Alex was not ready to give up. Although Helen had opened up a lead Alex had generated some late game momentum with one of those quick expansion empires which can earn good points while they survive. To have a chance though, he needed more time to profit from the advantage. He didn’t get it. Last to go in the round, Helen sealed a pretty comprehensive win by just nipping past the 100 barrier and closing out the game.

Scores: Helen 101; Alex 93; Federico 83; Ron 82; Bill 78

At about two and a half hours this was the quickest Vinci yet. I think the game is still too long for what it is, but I must admit it is beginning to grow on me. There is a bit more to it than you might expect at first sight and the movement of the civilisations is not as obvious as I had previously thought. The decisions over when to go into decline and how many VPs to burn on a new empire remain as delicious as ever.

Vinci is not, however, involved enough to justify its length. Even at a good pace I still think it is too repetitive. It is not without a luck element either. While the method for choosing civilisations my lessen the impact any super-combo might have, the imbalance is still there. It is also a game where it really nigh on impossible to come back after a bad turn. While this may be a just reward for poor play, it is a right pain if you have to sit through two hours of a game knowing that the most you are going to do is earn a few drinks by stomping on the perceived leader for someone else’s benefit.

Of course, I should add that I am totally crap at the game, which does not help.

Ratings: Helen 8.5; Federico 7; Bill 7.5; Ron 8; Alex 8

Although I share most of Federico’s ambivalence towards it, this was a much improved showing for Vinci, and a just reward for the decision to try it again despite its poor first showing (although do not expect Dog Eat Dog to receive the same leniency).

The moral of the story: If you want to enjoy playing Vinci, don’t fart about.

Stephensons Rocket, Riffifi

Present: Alex, Federico, Ron, Bill

It is a bit of a retro period for the group, as we take advantage of the knowledge gained in the past few months to replay some of the games which impressed first time around. Next week we are giving Vinci another try, to see if a resolute group can up the playing pace and get it finished in a reasonable time.

This week we settled on Stephensons Rocket, the first game to be played by the group back in September. I had no influence on the decision but was pleased nonetheless. When we first played SR it seemed like a game with a fair amount of depth which would only be revealed with repeat runs. After tonight’s session I still think this is true, and I suspect we need to play it a few more times to really get a feel for it.

Federico was the odd one out, not having played it before, but he soon got a grip on the reasonably straightforward rules.

The early rounds saw similar moves from everyone, placing a station and expanding a favoured rail line. After a while the city commodity tokens were also targeted. Deciding to practice what I preached in the review I decided to pretty much ignore the commodities and concentrate my efforts on placing stations and expanding one rail line: in the this case, the orange one.

Federico soon developed a similar strategy, and it was his red line in the north and my orange line in the south which developed into the game's biggies. I knew it would be close finish when I finally merged orange into red. It left me with the most stations on the merged entity, with Federico second, while the positions were reversed in the case of shareholdings. The merger payout I received for the move, however, persuaded me that it was the best option.

The strategy paid off, just.

Scores: Bill 71,000; Federico 60,000; Ron 55,000; Alex 40,000

The game still leaves my main concern with SR unanswered. Is it the case that the only way to win the game is to make sure you have the majority of stations on the biggest line, a tactic which will also net you some useful merger payouts and railway town connections?

I have won the game each time I have played with this approach. I don't think it is necessarily watertight (although I would recommend it as a strategy for beginners). Perhaps the strategy will fail when all the other players are trying the same thing. In this event, the commodities will become more important. More aggressive use of the veto round should also make it more difficult for any player to build up an unassailable shareholding in a powerful line.

Whatever. It is still a fine game with quite a few plays left in it.

Ratings: Ron 7.5; Alex 7.5; Federico 8; Bill 8

We ended the session with another round of Riffifi, which seems to have quickly established itself as the closer of choice. We played with the officer variant this time, which gives one player per round the chance to negate any card currently face up on the table. It adds a bit of a random element to negate some of the advantage of the card-counters but does not seem to skew the game.

I like Riffifi well enough, although I can’t say I have really grasped the essentials of it. Unlike Alex and Ron, who are now the acknowledged masters of the game. In their personal battle for supremacy, Ron got her revenge for last week’s defeat by squeaking past Alex. I was in contention for a little while but a disastrous final round score of 2 points plunged me back into the land of the also-rans – inhabited by Federico – where, surprise, surprise, we ended up tied again!

Scores: Ron 68; Alex 66; Federico 51; Bill 51

There are still a few official variants to try, and I suspect we will get plenty of chances.

Ratings: Ron 8; Alex 8.5; Federico 7; Bill 7.5

Riffifi, Attila

Present: Helen, Alex, Federico, Ron, Bill

Back to a full complement and a chance to try out one of new batch of fun but lightweight card games which sprang out of Essen. Of the three I have – the others are Meuterer and Kathai – Riffifi seems the lightest.

Designed by Stefan Dorra and published by German company Winning Moves, the game has some strengths, the most obvious being the dreaded explanation time of only a couple of minutes. Despite a respectable output of well regarded games, this is the first Dorra design I have tried. On this showing I will be on the look out for others; Riffifi definitely has a dorra dorra laughs (sorry…).

The forty card pack is divided into five coloured suits, each numbered one to eight. In the four and five player game all of the cards are dealt out. 60 wooden chips make up the rest of the game components. These comprise of five sets of tokens matching the colours of the suits. Play moves around the table as each player places a single card from his hand face up on the table in front of him. If another player already has a card in the same suit on the table, but of a higher value, that card is turned face down. If the card played is of a higher value than a card of the same colour already on the table, the card played is turned down. When the play returns to a player and he still has a card face up in front of him (i.e. a round has passed without a player undercutting his card) he receives the number of chips in that colour equal to the number on his card, which is then turned over. So playing a low value card has more chance of success, but a high value card will reap greater dividends if you can get away with it.

At first, all the chips start in a communal pot. As the play progresses, however, and the chips are taken by the players, the pot is quickly run down to the point where there are not enough chips left to meet the players' claims. When this happens, the balance of chips owed is taken from the player who is holding most of that colour.

Since chips are retained throughout the game (consisting of as many hands as there are players) individual holdings can rise and fall very quickly. Scores are counted up at the end of each hand (one point per chip), most points at the end of the game wins.

I am not sure what the theme of the game is (not being able to read German – or speak German, or point to Germany on a map for that matter). Looking at the bland but functional artwork on the cards I am prepared to guess at a crime family motif, with each family fighting over the spoils of a robbery. Not that this makes a blind bit of difference.

It didn’t take long to get into the swing of it. Alex, Ron and myself made a pretty strong start, gathering a reasonable haul of chips on the first turn. Only Alex, however, grasped the principles of the game quickly enough to actually hang on to his ill-gotten gains throughout the game. In the five hands we played his worst single scoring round came to 16, compared to the low single figures everyone else suffered at least once.

Scores: Alex 101; Ron 65; Helen 48; Federico 44; Bill 41

To be fair, we probably could have done more to haul Alex back had we really set our minds to it, but there is a strong temptation to maximise your own gains rather than think about the bigger picture. It also takes a little while to appreciate the flow of the game. It does not matter how well you do in the first half of a hand, any gains can quickly be wiped out by a few successful high value card played by your opponents towards the end of a round when you have less opportunity to retaliate.

It is difficult to assess the luck/skill ratio on the strength of a single play, though I suspect more of the latter. It is certainly a good exercise in basic card counting, which is a useful game skill to develop and keep sharp. The unusual scoring mechanics add another level of strategy to the game as well, where a strong holding in a colour can work against you, marking you out as a target for raids from other players.

Ratings: Federico 7; Alex 8; Helen 8.5; Ron 8; Bill 7.5

An excellent result then, and one which will guarantee it a few more plays, possibly using one of the several interesting variants included in the rules. Federico marked it down largely through a general ambivalence towards card games but a seven is no shame for a game.

Next up was Attila, the Karl-Heinz Schmiel game I was keen to play again (see December 26 session report for a fuller description of the mechanics). Again, a simple game to explain considering its depth, and we were quickly into it.

Ron had taken in the lessons of our previous session and played a strong game. She quickly gauged which tribes were likely to be the most successful and concentrated her efforts on these two (green and black as I recall). Alex too – obviously on a roll – was quickly into his stride. Ultimately, Ron accelerated away in the later stages of the game while the rest of us were tightly grouped, each in with a chance of nicking second place. In the end I was forced to pull the curtain down on the game during my turn by provoking enough conflicts to finish the fourth period. In doing so I knew I was letting Alex in for the runners-up spot but I had little choice. Any other play would have seen my own position erode as other players took their turns. Federico, in particular, was threatening to push me out of my major scoring tribe altogether – a move which would have relegated me to last place.

Scores: Ron 80; Alex 60; Bill 57; Helen 54; Federico 35

Ratings: Ron 8; Alex 7; Bill 7.5; Helen 7; Federico 7.5

A good rating, if unspectacular, but I am sure it will be played again. The game’s major weakness is the high fiddle factor involved in keeping track of player influence within each tribe. Attila is also pretty dry, and tends to get played in almost funereal silence. There is plenty of interaction, but only on the board – vocal chords not required. This probably holds it back from achieving the high eights. There is a lot going on, however, and there is no denying the elegance in the design, which packs a fair amount of depth into an easily assimilated and quickly played game – not much beyond the hour in this instance.

We have decided on a Golden Oldie session next week. Not a single unplayed box will be allowed on the table. It will be interesting to see which games have lingered longest in the collective memory.

La Citta, Carcassonne

Present: Federico, Ron, Bill

Only three for the first regular session of the New Year, but it is bound to take time to get the momentum going again. It was probably just as well that Alex and Helen were not here since rumour had it that they had played La Citta to death over the Christmas break, elevating them to expert status.

Not that I needed to worry about being used by Helen or Alex to wipe the floor, since Federico was quite happy to step into the breach and humiliate me.

For the second time, we played an accidental variant of La Citta thanks to yours truly getting the rules wrong. This time it was a playing area gaffe. Various areas of the La Citta board are used with different numbers of players, in order to guarantee that conflict between cities will be forced upon the players. For some reason I decided that the two-player area was the one which applied to the three player game, creating a claustrophobic setup from the start. Ooops.

For the first time we worked with the advanced version of the game, where the terrain tiles are place randomly and the players choose where to start their cities, Settlers style. A combination of the small playing area and an unbalanced distribution of farm tiles made the battle for control of the three food token tile vital, with certain hexes offering farms a potential production rating of five.

Federico got the prime site, followed by Ron. I had no choice but to look at the less productive areas for food. The cities were soon in attack range of each other and Federico quickly gained the upper hand in the battle with Ron around the premier farm tile, while Ron compensated by kicking my farming city with her second development. This left me woefully short of food and restricted the development of my major city, which had once looked quite a promising counter to Federico’s growth.

By the mid-game I really had nothing to play for, although Ron was still snapping away at Federico’s heels. It was not enough.

Scores: Federico 30; Ron 25, Bill 13

And so, for the first time, Federico and I are not tied on scores. Unfortunately, it was not the last time either.

Ratings: Ron 7; Federico 8.5; Bill 8

I still like this game, even though I keep playing it wrong (and badly). My one reservation is that I suspect the play will feel quite samey after a while, I do not think it is a particularly deep game. As Ron remarked in marking the game down, it is also quite possible to have a pretty bad time of it through no fault of your own, through a combination of poor card draws and no access to the best city sites.

Federico is a convert, after two games (both played with a vital rule missing or misinterpreted). I dread to think what his rating will be when we finally get it right.

With Ron retiring, Federico and I gave Carcassonne a run through. Federico soon got a handle on it and scored consistently with some big cities. Meanwhile he kept an eye on my rather obvious farmer strategy, maintaining a parity of influence in the big field thus protecting his scoring advantage. I did not even get close.

Scores: Federico 80; Bill 61

Ratings Federico 7; Bill 7

I must admit I am losing interest in this game pretty quickly. In the immortal words of Donald Sutherland on inspecting a parade of soldiers in The Dirty Dozen, "Very pretty General, but can they fight?"

Which is my essential problem with Carcassonne. It is extremely pretty, and looks like it should have some depth. But after a couple of games you are soon splitting your head open on the bottom of the swimming pool. There really is very little to this. The decisions are usually obvious and often forced. The only decision making lies in judging how many resources you should devote to farming while long or even medium-term planning is out of the question because you are forced to live with the luck of the tile draw. True, I suppose an experienced player could memorise the various types of tile in the deck and work with probabilities in the same way as a card counter at Blackjack. But then such a person would be much better employed playing Blackjack.

I now see Carcassonne as an amusing filler which won’t last beyond the arrival of the next amusing filler. This is a pity, because I am sure with a few rule tweaks and some extra bits it could have been a real corker.

Friday January 5

Europa 1945-2030

Present: Judith, Richard, Lyn, Sarah, Ron, Bill

I cannot really continue to call our Friday gatherings irregular as they are fast becoming a fixed monthly event – which is nice.

One problem, however, is that we are nearly through my collection of six-player games, forcing a few of the more unfancied ones to the fore. I am pushing to get the whole set played before we start going back for seconds. As a result we plumped for a game which has been weighing down the shelves for years, abandoned and unplayed. We even had to punch out all of the cardboard bits, a pleasure I usually reserve for myself, when I am alone…

There is something about this game which puts people off at first sight. Whether it is the theme – the unification of Europe under the umbrella of the European Union – or the somewhat bizarre box art where the centrepiece is a big picture of a baby – I am not sure. But it is a pity, because once we got started with Europa we had a pretty intense experience.

At heart this is a pretty straightforward placement and negotiation game. With each player representing some form of Pan-European, pro EU power-broker. The components are first rate: A big board showing a map of 1990’s Europe divided into its constituent countries; lots of people pawns in six colours representing the influence of the players (divided equally between male and female pieces which is laudably PC); a pack of cards with each showing the name of a European country along with several game-related (and non-game related) numbers; and, best of all, lots of cardboard overlays. Each country on the map has an associated blue coloured puzzle piece which is placed on the board when and if its joins the Euro bandwagon.

Several larger overlays are also placed on the board to cover certain areas (Portugal and Spain, Turkey, the USSR and the Communist bloc). These are removed as the game progresses, allowing the countries underneath to attempt to join up. The biggest impact occurs in turn 3, as the Berlin Wall is pushed over by the weight of expectation and hordes of poets, tractor manufacturers and black marketeers join together to push their countries towards the grand European design. Or something like that.

If I had played the game before it would have taken me five minutes to explain the rules. As it was, starting form scratch, I fell back to reading out the rulebook. This came close to ruining the game before we had even started. The rules are appallingly overwritten. Not only that, they are ambiguous and, worst of all, liberally interspersed with irrelevant and naive eulogies to the march towards European unification. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m as much of Europhile as the next man – not that this means an awful lot in Devon – but I can do without wading through a Brussels-sourced press release when I am trying to explain how to play a game.

There we go, rant over. In essence the game is simple to grasp. In the six player version each player starts with two pawns and a political point score of 20 which is recorded on the scoring track which stretches around the board edge. The cards representing the countries that could have conceivably joined the EU at its outset are shuffled and dealt face up on a separate election board. The order in which the cards fall determines the order in which the elections in each country are resolved. To help the players visualise this, numbered discs corresponding to the election order are placed on the appropriate countries on the main board. The game is played over four rounds, with new country cards being added to the mix on turns two and three.

The aim of the game is to collect the most victory points. The primary source of these are through winning elections, with important secondary sources coming from awards for peacekeeping efforts and for ending the game with the most political points, in which case the player is elected President of the EU and given 3 VPs.

But it is during the election phase that most of the game is played. In Europa, wining an election means overcoming a country’s nationalists and voting to join the EU. To achieve this, the players must have enough pawns placed in the country to at least equal the country’s anti-Europe number. This is listed on the country card and can range from an aren’t we already members? Rating of 1 for Luxembourg, to a ‘the only place to see the EU is from the turret of a tank’ rating of 6 for Russia.

The first part of the election phase sees the pawn placement, each player placing half of his pawns on the board in the first round, and then the rest in the second round.

After pawn placement the elections are decided in the order determined at the beginning of the turn.

Sometimes a single player will have enough pawns to beat the nationalists and win the election on his own. More usually coalitions have to be organised to beat the opposition. After a period of often ferocious negotiation, each player, in order of political point totals, highest first, gets to propose a coalition. If all the members of the proposed group give their assent then the election is won, victory points are awarded and the political point value of the country in question is divvied up amongst the victors. Most important, each member of the successful coalition can take one of their pawns from that country and place it in another country still to have its election. The only restriction is that the new country must be adjacent to a blue overlay representing the growing EU. This is the area where the rules ambiguity lies, with early translations suggesting you had to place a pawn in a country adjacent to the one where the election had just been held. This is not the case.

This really is the key to the game. Pawns are in short supply and if you fail to get into the winning teams in the first few elections you can easily find yourself with no negotiating chips for the rest of the turn. Whereas a couple of early successes can see you build an electoral steamroller as your pawns keep popping up in key positions. Since the number of pawns you receive each turn is determined by your political point score, failure and success will often lead to more failure or success.

The only other consideration is the potential for war to erupt in non-EU countries. When wars break out a peacekeeping effort by the players is required, which, if it fails, could see war spread quickly, making further EU enlargement more difficult, or even impossible.

Potential conflicts emerge on turns three and four (it is a four turn game) and are determined by six dice rolls on a country table. The first time a non-EU country is rolled a tension marker is placed on it. If a country with a tension marker is rolled, then that country falls into civil war. If such a country is rolled again, then all its neighbouring non-EU countries receive a tension or a war marker.

Countries at war cannot hold elections, while countries with tension markers gain a one point boost for the nationalist support level.

The number and intensity of conflicts is converted into a numerical value for the overall tension level in Europe: the more wars, the higher the number. To resolve the conflicts the players secretly and simultaneously sacrifice a number of their pawns in a peacekeeping effort, hoping to match or exceed this conflict number. The greater the number of pawns sacrificed, the higher the chance of success, but the fewer pawns which will be available for the upcoming election phase.

The player who contributes most to the peace effort receives a bonus of four victory points if it is successful, whereas, if the combined efforts of the players fail to match the conflict number, then the player who contributed least will lose four victory points. These are significant gains and losses and could easily prove a game winner or loser.

The war element is a nice mechanic which adds variety to the game. It provides a chance to haul back a leader who may be forced to sacrifice a lot of pawns in order to guarantee success, or at least to safeguard his victory points in the case of a failure.

Once we started playing, the glazed-over zombies perpetrated by the rules readout were soon replaced by some flinty-eyed negotiators. Ron and Sarah were first out of the blocks, forming an unholy alliance on the strength of a couple of nods and winks. By the time the rest of us had cottoned on to the scheme we had already been left behind in the race for political points, our own campaigns failing to generate any momentum.

In the second round the two leaders managed to build on their successes by utilising their pawn advantage gained through their lead in political points. Richard and Judith made up some ground on the leaders while Lyn and I continued to falter.

The third turn proved pivotal. I made my major move in the peace phase, where I managed to pick up the four victory points for heading a successful peacekeeping effort. This was useful, and kept me in the game, although it did leave me woefully short of pawns for the election phase. To have any chance of getting back in the game I needed to build up some real momentum. Lyn and I hatched out a cunning plan which, if Judith joined up, could see us freezing out Ron and Sarah in Hungary, moving into Russia where we could pick up vast quantities of political points, and then continuing on through eastern Europe atop a tidal wave of Euro-fever.

Alas, it all came to nought. After some serious negotiations, offers and counter-offers, threats, sighs and emotional collapse, Judith decided to abandon the idea of an alliance with us paupers and hitched herself to Ron’s electioneering machine. With this decision, Richard, Lyn and myself were effectively finished, although there was still plenty of game left for the others. In the campaign for Russia, the very next election, Ron put her substantial Diplomacy experience to work and stabbed Sarah comprehensively by keeping her out of the Russian dividend. As political point leader Ron was taking full advantage of being the first player to suggest a coalition in each election in which she had a presence.

The fourth turn went by in a rush, as Richard, Sarah, Lyn and myself cooperated as much as we could to freeze out Ron and Judith (illegally in some cases I now realise, as you cannot have more than three players in a coalition, but I don’t think this would have had much impact on the final result). It was all too little, too late, however, and our limited gains only served to add a bit of respectability to our scores, and allowed me the relief of avoiding the ignominy of being lapped by wifey on the Political Point track.

Judith reaped the rewards of her earlier decision to go with the leader, securing a solid second place. At the time of the deal I thought she was mad to side with Ron, but in retrospect I suspect she made the optimum move. A guaranteed second place is favourable to an unknown position based on a strategy which was not all that likely to succeed in pulling Ron all the way back.

Scores (political points/victory points)

Ron 155/30; Judith 128/26; Richard 107/21; Sarah 119/18; Bill 66/17; Lyn 76/16

So, only close for the also-rans and, while political points may not equate exactly to victory points, you can bet that you are not going to be far off the win if you are ahead on the political point track.

Ratings: Richard 9; Judith 9; Lyn 8; Sarah 7; Bill 8.5; Ron 8.5

This is a strong showing, probably the highest rated game so far for this group. Sarah was the only dissenting voice – The lack of control over one’s destiny (and the fact the game took considerably longer than I estimated, particularly with my excruciating rules explanation) soured the game a bit for her I think.

The game is ludicrously overproduced for what it is, and the rules are verbose and a little opaque (although, to be fair, had I stuck to the starter rules rather than the full rules it would have been better). The theme will not appeal to everyone and it is difficult to see any real-world counterpart for the role of the players. Having said all this, it was great fun, and a good introduction to a negotiation style game. The core mechanics are simple and sound, and are likely to appear in other games, I am sure, and probably already have.

There has been a potentially disastrous fallout from the Europa experience. Several players have now expressed an interest in drumming up one more recruit and giving Diplomacy a try. In the world of games I suspect this is the closest you will get to the idea that dangerous talk costs lives. Diplomacy talk costs friendships!