Chaos in the Old World

Finally brought Chaos in the Old World to the table Saturday night. Dave, Monica, the Mrs. and I worked through the rules and made it through a couple of rounds before we called it a night. Armed with a better understanding of the rules, we met up again the next night, minus Monica, and played through a full game.

Dave & the Mrs. seemed to think poorly of the amount of luck in the game (because of die rolls as well as card draws), but I feel that the vast quantity of decisions in Chaos in the Old World more than makes up for this. One of the major benefits a board game gains by having luck elements is a need for players to adjust strategy as conditions change unexpectedly. This is certainly a quality I enjoy in games, and after one play I think there is an appropriate amount of luck present. (Though, of course, this opinion is subject to change, and certain other players in the room may strongly disagree!)

There is a lot going on here: players can win either by advancing their own personal victory dials to a certain level, or by achieving a certain threshold on the common victory point track. VPs themselves can be gained both through having a strong military presence in a region (by dominating the area), or by corrupting a region with one's rather weak cultist figures (eventually ruining a region and gaining large numbers of VPs). In Chaos, players must balance their personal victory goals with paying close attention to the other players' goals as to block them from advancing too quickly.

As in El Grande (another area control game), there does seem to be a disadvantage in building a strong early presence in the game, as the other players are very motivated to take down the leader. I felt in this first play I established myself a little too early as the leader and paid for that fact throughout the mid-game. Dave, through some good late-game die rolls and maximizing his victory dial bonuses, ended up the winner, but if one roll during the last turn would have landed differently the game would have gone an additional round and anyone could have been victorious.

I eagerly await our next play of Chaos in the Old World, as it is a deep and intriguing game, both very thematic and seemingly well balanced.

Five & Dime for 1st Quarter 2010

You can tell I've been serious about the board game hobby this year because for the first time I've been tracking my plays on Board Game Geek. The website has my entire collection listed, and each time I play a game I record the play and note anything interesting about the session and the winner and any scores.

One of the best aspects of this record is that I can tell which games I've been playing the most. One common way of tracking games played over the course of time (especially on an annual basis) is a 'five and dime' list that tracks the games one has played at least 10 and at least 5 times. Including face to face game nights, plays online, and head to head games with my daughter, here's my first three months (more or less) this year:

Carcassonne (12 plays)
Dominion (8 plays)
Ghost Stories (8 plays)
Pandemic (8 plays)
Ca$h'n Gun$ (6 plays)
Race for the Galaxy (6 plays)
Agricola (5 plays)
Dixit (5 plays)

That's a pretty good list that encompasses most of my favorite games. Time's Up: Title Recall would be the most glaring omission and that is sitting at 4 plays currently for the year. I do, however, think that something can be said for just those plays I've had during face to face sessions this year. So, stripping away games with the kiddos and those played online we get to this core list:

Ghost Stories (6 plays)
Dominion (6 plays)
Race for the Galaxy (6 plays)
Ca$h'n Gun$ (6 plays)
Agricola (5 plays)

The primary differences here are Carcassonne which I've played exclusively this year with Abby or online, and Pandemic which I almost only play online. This list is in some ways a companion piece to "The List" of unplayed games I wrote about several posts ago. Many of those games are fringe titles that need a specific group or a particular situation to find play time, whereas these on the five & dime list are the core of my collection that see play after play. We shall see how the two lists develop over the course of the next few months...

A Pair of Favorites

We had Zachary over last night for games. Ghost stories was first up and we took a crack at Nightmare level, the first to involve multiple incarnations of Wu-Feng rather than just one. We took out the first of four, but after that nasty black ghosts and a tough one two punch of Wu-Feng incarnations brought the game out of hand. I was impressed by the new style of play however, and look forward to our next go round.

The Mrs. retired upstairs to study and Zachary and I pulled out Dominion for a quick game. We used the base set with random kingdom cards. I tried a chapel strategy and was able to pick up a couple of gold early, but Zachary managed to stay right in step and when I had the opportunity to end the game with my fifth province purchase I had the feeling he would still be the victor because of having more estates, gardens, and duchies. I delayed game's end to try to get a step up, but he was able to keep pace and take the last province to boot for the victory. I think perhaps key to ditching estates early with chapel is to have some extra buys in the mid to late game to replace those lost vps with a few extra victory cards.

I'm looking forward to playing Chaos in the Old World this weekend for the first time, and have been reading and taking notes on Through the Ages as well, though I wasn't able to get it to the table yesterday as I'd hoped.

Back in the Saddle

After a full ten days absent from board games, I played a quick round of Pandemic on BrettSpielWelt last night with Tom. We played on maximum difficulty (Legendary), he was the Medic and I the Generalist. Medic was strong as usual, helping with board control, but the Generalist still feels weak, especially in a two player game. We were desperately in need of a role that would allow us to find cures more easily such as Researcher or Scientist, as the player cards were falling in about the least efficient manner possible.

We finally did find a lone cure four epidemics into the game, but were far far from winning when the inevitable disaster struck.

I'm exited to get in a game of Ghost Stories with Zachary and the Mrs. tonight, and if I can learn the game, perhaps Through the Ages this afternoon.

According to My Notes...

...I am ready to play Chaos in the Old World. Now I just need to feel better enough that I can reenter the land of the living. Hopefully that will be soon!

I actually found the rules to Chaos in the Old World to be very well written. The basic rule set has a number of different phases that are a little complicated, but the order of everything in the game seems very clear, and there are numerous examples detailed throughout the book. I remember being completely bewildered after reading through the Fury of Dracula rules (another heavy strategy game published by the same people as Chaos, Fantasy Flight Games).

Either these rules are better arranged or the game is simply not as fiddly as Fury of Dracula. I suspect a combination of each is responsible, but I suppose I find out when I play!

Boards, Cards, Etc.

Recently I've been trying to decide if there is room in my life for more than one gaming hobby.

Board Games

Certainly this is my primary interest in the hobby, and it's a fitting one if it's the only gaming niche in which I participate, largely because of its flexibility. I can pull out a board game to play when I'm alone and want a solitaire game, a two player game to share with the Mrs. or a friend, a strategy game for four or five, a party game for 6 or 8, or a handful of different titles to split up a very large group into 2 or 3 separate tables. A stack of board games can be thrown in the car and played with friends or family on a trip, or a game can tag along to a coffee shop or restaurant and be played over a drink or snack. There are even versions of board games online that I can play with long distance friends and relatives.

Collectible Card Games

CCG's, like Magic: the Gathering, are games in which you buy packs of cards and then build your own deck from the resulting card pool. Each player that plays constructs their own deck and uses it to play against others that have done the same. Magic is an amazing game, although keeping up with it is immensely expensive, and actually maintaining competitive decks would be even more so. Even so, the huge card pool that has been released over the years gives the game a huge amount of variety, the strategies are numerous, there are hundreds of different ways to play and thousands of ways to customize your style of deck and of play.

If taken just in a limited setting, Magic can fit in the board game world. I could simply take a stack of the cards I own and draft decks using that particular pool of cards with a number of friends, and then play. Magic is certainly best, however, when there is a large group of people playing in an area and many people building different types of decks and offering various styles of play. This is not really the case right now in Canton, so it's difficult for me to be involved with the game at all, though it has meant I've been able to fully concentrate on pursuing my board game interests. Ideally I'd be able to have some board game friends that were also into Magic so that I could stay plugged into that scene a little as well.

The Rest

I have given a little thought to playing a role playing game (RPG) at some point. I think it's something I'd devote a little time to if I happened to find an awesome group that inspired me to do so. I would say it is an ongoing interest of mine, but not something that I'd be willing to get off the ground myself. I did play a little Dungeons & Dragons long ago, but the group was not very interesting, and the DM not very ambitious.

I also rather enjoy video games, but I've now owned Okami for the Wii for a year, and despite loving the game, I just don't find enough time to play. Not that the pastime isn't enjoyable, I just choose to play the board game first every time.

Collectible miniatures have never really interested me all that much--they eat time & money just like M:tG, and I really don't have the same spark of interest in them as in collectible card games, so I think I can do without. I do have a Heroscape Basic Set, which is somewhat of a cross between board games and collectible miniatures, so I may end up pursuing that a little anyway.

Live Action Role Playing (LARP) is another part of the hobby I've never pursued, though many of my friends in the Burlington area did (and still do, so far as I know.) Not that the idea isn't quite intriguing, but I just don't see myself devoting that amount of time in another undertaking.

Massive Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games (MMPORPGs) like World of Warcraft are immensely popular right now and I bet they would be a riot to play. They strike me as immersive and quite entertaining, but again, when played to their potential, these types of games don't really leave much time for other pursuits.

Well, that's probably enough babbling for now. Keep playing!

Board Game Reading

The Mrs. went out out last night, so I poked around a little on boardgamegeek.com before I passed out. Sometimes I'll just follow links to random games on the 'Hotness,' a list of games that have been recently or frequently viewed on the site. This gives me a mix of the obscure and the well known, and makes for generally good information.

The games I perused:

• "Rezolution: A Dark Tomorrow is a fast paced, cinematic miniature battles game set in an original science fiction universe, with revolutionary simultaneous play and story based missions. Players need very few miniatures to begin play, in fact a starter set contains all you need." Released 2005. This seems like it's a collectible miniatures game and I really don't want to get into anything else collectible (M:tG is enough!) It does sound like a lot of fun, however, and I wonder if it is actually a really good experience right out of the box or if you really need to develop an army through booster packs. Intriguing, but probably nothing I'll bite on.
• Le Havre is a worker placement game by Ewe Rosenberg, and considered to some extent a sequel to his excellent Agricola. I read an incredibly long and thoroughly detailed review calling Le Havre "A Landmark Game." Besides making me very interested in the game (which it did!) the article references older games that the author maintains were stepping stones to this one, and insists that Le Havre is the best game of it's type, namely "resource game." (Resources are acquired throughout the game that can then be converted to food, used for energy, shipped to sell at market, or used in the construction of new buildings.) This concept of progress in game design intrigues me--some say that the obsession with the new is foolish and that games designed 10 years ago are just as good as those today, and then others, like the author of this review insist that some games built upon the shoulders of their predecessors make grand improvements and set a high water mark for the genre. In this case he generally seems to be referencing three games that he has great respect for, Agricola, Caylus, and Puerto Rico.
• I watched Tom Vasel's video review of a fantasy adventure card game called Adventure of D. It seems like a pretty interesting concept--12 place cards are laid out on the board which represent the kingdom you are exploring, and each player has a character with different sets of abilities. During the game additional cards will be drawn, and each card has a host of different purposes, depending on the reasons it was drawn. For instance, some cards can be discarded to move to other places in the kingdom, other times you will find a magical item, and one part of each card details such an item. I love this type of mechanic in a game--where you have a common pile of cards you're working through, but depending on the situation the same card may be used for several different things. This really makes for a huge amount of game to be condensed into a very small deck of cards. I don't know that I'm going to rush out and get this one, but it does strike my interest.
• Finally, I took a brief look at Time's Up: Deluxe, which is the original version of Time's Up (not the Title Recall edition), but with some cards from the two expansions mixed in and a nifty electronic timer to mark the turns. I might be tempted to purchase this at some point since it would give the game even more replayability and the timer would also be neat to have. My only concern is that we might not like guessing famous names as much as we do the titles in our version.

Maybe one of these days I'll actually play a game or two...