Gulf Games 13 Report

by Susan Rozmiarek
Well, we're back after another fantastic time at Gulf Games. After a busy week of catching up, I have finally finished writing up a report on the event and the games I played. Check it out, but be warned-it's long. Only an event like Gulf Games can compel me to write this much! Susan's Gulf Games 13 Report

Gulf Games 13 pictures

by Ed Rozmiarek
We're back from Gulf Games 13. I have posted the 200+ pictures I took during the event to our photo gallery. They can be found in the Gulf Games 13 album.

As always, we had a great time. The people, the games, the location, they all were top notch and I wish we could have stayed longer. We'll post more thoughts later after we catch up some more. Until then, enjoy the pictures.

Gulf Games here we come

by Susan Rozmiarek
Ed, the kids, and I are off to Pensacola, Florida to attend Gulf Games 13. This has become a twice-a-year event that we all really look forward to. We won't be back until Sunday, so this blog may be kind of quiet. We do plan to post pictures during the event if we can. I hope to play lots of new games and I will write up a full report here when we get back.

Gobblet

by Susan Rozmiarek
My younger son, Shea, really enjoys abstract games. So lately, after he takes a bath in the evening, we've been trying out some different games.

 

  Tonight it was Gobblet, which I found on a 50% off table at Barnes & Nobles. It comes with really nice wooden pieces and a board that slides out to reveal a compartment underneath. It’s not a bad deal for $15. As Ron Hale-Evans pointed out on the Piecepack Yahoo discussion group, there is room in this compartment to keep pieces to play other games. So now I'm on a hunt to find rules for other games played on a 4X4 board.

Gobblet itself is a nice little game. It’s a variant of tic-tac-toe, in which you are trying to get four of your pieces in a row. The twist is the pieces are of four different sizes, which all nest together. So when they move they can “gobble” up smaller pieces. These remain underneath until the bigger piece(s) move and uncover it again. This gives the game a bit of a memory element, which makes it quite different from other games of this type. Shea is rather good at it and beat me 3/5 times. There is a slight fix for the game suggested by Bruno Faidutti, which forbids the starting player from making his first placement on one of the center four squares of the board.

Susan and Shea play Gobblet. Watch out for Shea, he's a shark at the game.

Gobblet close up.

Session Report for February 12, 2004

by Susan Rozmiarek
I had soccer practice duty tonight, making me late. I was only able to get in two games, but both were very enjoyable.

 

Maya

I had yet to play this new game of building pyramids that had won the prestigious Hippodice contest in 2002. I had read that it was a pleasant mixture of familiar mechanisms. This turned out to be a very accurate description. Included in the rules were blind bidding, area majority control, cards with a dual purpose, and special actions along with a few unique twists. It was very good, though. Everything blended together very smoothly and the game had a unique feel to it despite its recycled mechanisms.

In this game, players are building pyramids. The object is to have a majority of your blocks on each completed row of the pyramids, as these rows will score at the end of each round. Players are bidding on both the number of blocks they will get to build during that round as well as the different special actions, which includes who gets be the starting player in the building round. The bidding is tense with a good bit of bluffing. Everyone has an identical set of cards, which are used for both bidding and building later. This requires you to carefully manage your hand, making sure you leave yourself with enough cards to build the blocks that you win. There is a really nice erosion mechanism at the end of each round, which penalizes the players that scored on each row, helping to keep leaders in check. Battles for controlling the rows can be fierce, with opportunities for clever plays using the special actions.

Ed and Jon each managed to dominate a pyramid near the end. Even so, the scores were fairly close.

Results: Ed 47, Jon 41, Susan 37, Mark 37, Roxana 24

Maya, After the final building round.

Finstere Flure, with two monsters

We decided to close out the evening with something fun. Finstere Flure remains very popular with our group. This time we decided to do something crazy and play with the “Dracula vs. Frankenstein” variant by Mike Mayer. This variant uses two monsters that move one right after the other, creating an even more deadly game.

Okay, this is definitely fun to try at least once. It worked well, but the problem with it was that our game bogged down as players took even longer than usual on their turns with two monsters to consider. It might be a little better to try this with fewer players. The downtime with the five of us prompted Ed to get out the G8 Game Timer as a threat. Of course, he was just as slow on his turn.

We were each able to get one person out, with Doug being the first to accomplish this impossible feat. The rest of our people were slaughtered mercilessly by the monsters.

Results: Doug in first, followed by Mike, Ed, Mark and Susan

Yes, the two monsters stopped here. The poor soul.

Poor Becky Sue. It's always the cute blonde that is the last to go.

Other games played: Favoriten, Alhambra, Coloretto

Mike, Doug, Mark, Jeff and Ed warm up with a little horse racing action with Favoriten.

Doug, Rick, Jeff and Mike get in yet another game of Alhambra. Wake up Mike!

For more pictures from this gaming session and others, see our Gaming Picture Gallery.

Weekend Family Gaming

by Susan Rozmiarek
I got a chance to play a few of our new acquisitions this past weekend:

 

 

Carcassonne: The Castle

This is a two-player variation of the game. Since the original plays just fine with two, I really didn’t see the need for it. However, I was curious to see what new twists Reiner Knizia had added to the series so we bought a copy.

Ed started closing off things right away and zooming down the scoring track snatching those special chits. This made me mighty nervous, but I was finally able to score a few things and catch up and get a few chits myself. Toward the end, Ed’s luck started to fail while mine improved. I was able to use my 2x castle chit for 16 points. Then the very last tile I drew closed off a long road with a well and a castle. Plus, I had quite of few markets. Ed got a good number of points for having the largest keep, but was not able to draw what he needed towards the end to keep turning over his meeples for points. I ended up winning by a pretty hefty margin.

This still just feels mostly like Carcassonne to me. With meeples in short supply, you have to be able to close things off and get them back. Usually you gamble with your meeple placements and hope to get lucky and draw the needed tiles to make them pay off. The strategy of trying to sneak in and tie on a majority is the same.

There are a few new, interesting aspects in The Castle. The special chits force decisions between going for bigger scores or quick scores that will allow you to pick up a chit. The constrained playing area also gives it a bit of a different feel. I’m not sure if these new twists are enough to make it a worthwhile purchase yet. I need to play it a few more times.

Senjutsu

This was an impulse buy. Occasionally it’s fun to take a chance on a game. I hadn’t heard much about this game but the few opinions I had heard were favorable. It sounded like something Kevin would like and I was right. He’s been begging to play this every night this week. So far we’ve gotten in two games of it.

The game is basically a Stratego variant with a Samurai theme. Each player has ten warriors total with two different types, one with a little better movement options. What makes this game fun are some really interesting twists. Players have thirty weapon and armor pieces that they customize their warriors with. One of these is a scroll. Capturing your opponent’s scroll is the object of the game. There are several weapons with different ranges. These items stack under the warrior, their identity visible only to that player, and are discarded as they are used. If a warrior is killed, the items he was carrying are left on the board and can be picked up by any warrior that moves on to that space. One interesting item is a booby trap that explodes when an opponent tries to pick up the stack, instantly killing him. Discarded items can be gotten back if you kill an opponent’s officer.

The other neat twist is the action cards. Each player has an identical deck of cards and gets to draw one for each turn in which he kills at least one of his opponent’s warriors. He can then play one of these per turn or, in the case of some of the cards, for defense on his opponent’s turn.

On a player’s turn, they must chose one of their warriors and move it at least once. Optionally, they move a second time. Attacks are also optional, and can take place before and/or after either of the two moves, using as many weapons as the warrior is carrying and wants to use. There are, of course, some obstacles on the board that interfere with movement and line-of-sight. The game ends when an enemy scroll is captured or all of a player’s warriors are eliminated.

Kevin trounced me in our first game. The second game he won again but it was much closer. Kevin informed me that I was finally getting it and played much better. (Annoying child!). Despite my humiliating losses, I’m eager to play again. The game plays very quickly and with the custom set-up, provides many strategic options.

The start of Senjutsu.

Ranger Rabbit tries to get in on the Senjutsu action.

Boulder Games Saturday Night Sales

by Susan Rozmiarek
Boulder Games has been having some great Saturday night sales lately, usually around 6:00 (central) in the evening. Searching on "saturday" pulls up the list. Most of the stuff is junk, but there are usually some gems buried in the list. Last night our friend Mark got a copy of Welt der Winde for $19.80. The previous week we ordered New England (English. ed.) for $16.80 and The Ark of the Covenant for $11.80. Of course, we fell into their marketing trap and bought a few things not on sale!

It's worth checking out, although it doesn't appear that they have a sale every Saturday night. I also noticed one on a Sunday a while back. They usually have announcement about the sale in their newsletter on that day. One kicker though, is you can't order more than one of each item. If you do, your order is cancelled.

Session Report for February 5, 2004

by Susan Rozmiarek
We had a light turnout tonight, with only six gamers in attendance. I also only got in two games due to the fact that one of them was rather long. That was fine with me, as lately I’ve been more interested in quality not quantity.

 

Wildlife

I think it was Mike who had a hankering to try this one, and Ed and I were happy to oblige, both of us being fans of this area majority game. Rick also joined us for his first struggle to dominate the ancient earth.

Wildlife supports up to six players and the six different species, each with a different mix of strengths, are randomly assigned to players. Unfortunately, if the game is played with less than a full contingency of players, this random assignment can create an unbalanced game, with one or more players enjoying little competition from other players in the early part of the game. Fortunately, someone has provided a fix for this on the BoardgameGeek, designating which species should be used with various numbers of players. We used the four-player recommendation in our game and it worked well.

My crocodiles and Mike’s bears immediately started competing for forest regions while Ed’s snakes and Rick’s eagles squared off with talons and fangs over the desert. Soon though, thanks to evolution, we were all battling each other for dominance in many regions. I immediately grabbed a couple of intelligence tiles and was able to hold on to them both for several rounds, enabling me to do more actions and get more of my crocs on the board, closing off a few early regions. I also grabbed a food tile early on, giving me two points each turn. This was a risky strategy because it put me in the lead for the first half of the game. I might as well have painted targets on my tiles as the result would have been the same. Despite a hefty lead for the early part of the game, I got pounded on and Rick and Ed gradually gained ground. A few famines when I was short of food sent me further back on the track. Near the very end, I struggled to retain but lost several key majorities. Also, Mike and I had gotten in several bidding wars over forest cards put up for auction by Rick and ended up handing him way too much food for them. He was able to cash them in for a lot of victory points on his last turn. Ed really came from behind on the last few turns and the final scoring and rocketed way out in front for the win. Yuck, a planet dominated by…..snakes?

This game is really fluid. Players have to be able to quickly adjust their tactics with the board constantly changing and the ability tiles easily changing hands. Holding a hand of ten cards with many jokers in the deck gives one a good chance of being able to do something on his turn, although never as much as one would like. Plus, one is always torn between wanting to do something on the board and wanting to improve their species. The two must be carefully balanced. Throw in an auction mechanism in which one is spending victory points for an extra action, and you have plenty to think about. Actually, the amount to consider makes this a rather difficult game for a new player. There a quite a few things that score on a scoring round, and it is difficult to tell how it is all going to fall out, even for more experienced players.

All in all, I find this one of the more enjoyable area majority games because it feels more tactical to me than most games of this type. It is laden with theme and has one that is a good fit rather than just tacked on. I never feel like I am out of the game if I fall behind on the scoring track either, as I’ve seen plenty of big swings in scores toward the end. It definitely invites hitting on the leader, which doesn’t bother me but may put off some players. I’m glad to see it being reprinted in an English edition. Hopefully more people will get an opportunity to check it out.

Results: Ed 121, Rick 111, Susan 95, Mike 42

WildLife with Mike (bear), Rick (eagle), Susan (aligator) and Ed (snake).

Blokus

It was quite an abrupt change to go from such the very themed and rules heavy Wildlife to the very simple and abstract Blokus.

Ed and I were once again the ones familiar with the game and immediately started laying down big pieces in a race for the center. Rick and Mike caught on soon enough, although there was much groaning over missed opportunities. It definitely helps to have played the game before. Ed and I were in a heated contest at the end, but Rick made an evil block and prevented me from taking the victory. It turned out to be a great move for him as he pipped me out of second place.

Blokus is a fun game that goes over well with non-gamers and is visually appealing. The downside is that it works best with exactly four players.

Results: Ed -7, Rick -16, Susan -17, Mike -31

Other games played: Crokinole, Attika, Logistico

Ed and Mike warming up with Ed's new Crokinole board.

Delivering goods in Logistico is causing a few headaches for Mark, Jon, and Doug.

For more pictures from this gaming session and others, see our Gaming Picture Gallery.

Formula Dé February race

by Ed Rozmiarek
Super Bowl Sunday found us racing at Elkhart Lake in Wisconsin for the second race of the 2004 season. This track has several very long straights so we all expected lots of 5th and 6th gear action today. We weren't disappointed.

Highlights from this month's race included:

• Lots of 5th and 6th gear action meant the possibility for a lot of engine damage. Interesting enough, no one was knocked out of the race due to engine failure, however a couple of people were close. Susan raced the last lap and a half with 1 engine point left and Dan finished only one point left. Since both of them were in the top half of the pack, most of us were cheering anytime a 20 or 30 was rolled.
• The careful drivers who did not need to pit benefitted from the long front straight at Elkhart Lake. These drivers blazed down the front straight in 5th and 6th gear while those that pitted lost several turns slowing down getting into and out of the pits (thanks to our 4th gear pit entry speed limit house rule).
• After battling for first place with several others during the first lap, Robert skipped the pits and built a big lead for lap 2. Although he did pit after lap 2 and allowed Mark to catch up some, Robert was able to hold the lead for the entire lap 3 and cruised home to his first win.
• In yet another "Opps, what did I roll?" move, Jon rolled the 5th gear die going in to the last corner on the third lap. This caused him to crash just before the finish. Not that it hurt much as he moved from 7th to 9th place and only lost one point for not finishing.
• New paint jobs on several cars including Dan's yellow "Happy Face" car and Roxana's Lady Bug car. If you can't tell, we don't paint our cars based on real Formula One teams.

See our Formula Dé webpage for the detailed results of today's race or visit the picture gallery for the pictures from the race.

New Game Blog

by Susan Rozmiarek
Mike Chapel has a new weblog. Now you can find out what REALLY happens when our game group meets. Check it out!

Session Report for January 29, 2004

by Susan Rozmiarek
I had two goals tonight. The first one was to play at least one meaty game as lately it seems I’ve been playing a lot of fluff. Good fluff, but I’ve been feeling the need to exercise my brain a bit more. My second goal was to play at least one game with Mike, who was complaining that he is usually only in the footnotes of my game reports, since I only write up the games that I play. Fortunately, achieving one goal made it easy to achieve the other, as Mike tends to avoid the fluff.

Carabande

We recently purchased a new, enormous dining room table that can seat a whopping ten people when fully extended. I’ve wanted one for a while, and I was finally able to get Ed on my side, lured by the possibilities of being able to set up really big Carabande courses. And indeed it worked very well for that purpose, even without the extra leaves. It immediately sucked in nearly every male gamer as they came through the front door and a very loud game was soon in progress. I’m not sure about the details of the game, but it must have been exciting. Did I mention how loud they were?

Results: Ed in first, followed by Kevin, Doug, Mike and Jon

A big new dining room table means one thing... a big Carabande track.

Mike Chapel's excellent Carabande form.

Bonobo Beach

Fortunately, like me, Mark shuns flicking games and was more than happy to play a two-player game while waiting for the others to burn off some testosterone. We chose one of his new games, Bonobo Beach.

Bonobo Beach is interesting because it also comes in another edition, published simultaneously but with a medieval theme, called Cronberg. I’d actually played it awhile back because it started out as a free game one could download and print. It’s a tile-laying game that reminds me quite a bit of Auf Heller und Pfennig.

In the beach version, players are trying to control the most desirable spots on the beach. They do so by placing their tokens on these spots. The tiles have values on them, both negative and positive, and once tiles surround a marker, it is removed and the spot is scored. What’s unique about this game and sets it apart from others is the shape of the tiles. The tiles are rhombs and the board is made up of triangles with the beach spots located in the center of the hexagons formed by six triangles (this is hard to describe – see photo). When a tile is placed, it will cover two of these triangles. What makes this even more interesting is the fact that triangles can be isolated so that they cannot be covered by a tile. When this happens, the triangles become “activated,” and affect the beach spots bordering them. There are three types of these triangles, toilets that drive away player tokens without scoring, dunes that multiple the value of a spot by two, and sun shades that convert the negative numbers to positive. With the last two, player tokens remain on those spots until they are scored at the end of the game.

On a player’s turn he may either place a token or draw and place a facedown tile. This makes for interesting decisions about whether or not to commit a token to a spot too early, running the risk of being hosed by another player, who is sure to lay a negative tile there if he can. (Doesn’t this sound like the markets in Auf Heller?). The game ends when no more tiles or tokens can be placed. Then spots next to activated triangles are also scored.

I started out fairly well, but our game was interrupted and I found myself trying to carry on a conversation with someone else at the same time. Unfortunately, with my attention divided, I missed a couple of very choice spots, allowing Mark to grab them for big scores. He rolled right over me in points. I hope to try this again when I can give it my entire attention. I also think it will play even better with more players.

Results: Mark 115, Susan 33 (ouch!!)

While the others play Carabande, non-flickers Susan and Mark try out Bonobo Beach.

The colorful Bonobo Beach board.

Logistico

With the Carabande contest over, we broke into two groups, one heading off for a long game of Ursuppe while the rest of us sat down to a four-player game of Logistico. I’d played this once with two-players and was most impressed. The other three players were new to the game.

This game was so simple to explain, but it got off to a slow start as people analyzed the board full of goods and tried to visualize their best moves. Even with a hefty amount of starting capital, money is very tight in this game and everyone was grumbling about slim profit margins right from the start. There was also some complaining about going later in the turn order and not getting the lucky, easy first deliveries, but I think (hope) by the end of the game everyone realized that early deliveries were not the game-winning ones. It also took awhile for people to see how to put their airplanes to good use. It takes more planning to use them effectively.

This plays a bit differently with four players than with two. With the deliveries spread out amongst more players, the scores were much lower. Heck, I was thrilled to just get back to my starting amount. With the added competition, there was also more frustration as somebody else beating you to a particular resource often ruined careful planning. I kind of like this added tension, but I think it would be too much with five players. I find most puzzle games very satisfying and rewarding to play, and Logistico definitely falls into this category.

Results: Mike 45, Susan 41, Mark 39, Doug 35

Susan and Mike can't believe they're actually playing a game together.

Mark had to prove that he was in first place at least once during Logistico.

Attika

Next up was the game creating more buzzing than a beehive on the gaming forums. We are all still fairly inexperienced with the game and this playing ended up being over very quickly. Doug got within a tile away from connecting two temples, thereby focusing everyone’s attention on stopping him. While this was going on, I was lucky enough to collect three street tiles on my player board. It looked like Doug was going to win on his turn, but I was able to build a building on one of those available connecting spots while Mike was able to build on the other, stopping Doug. However, nobody had noticed that I was three tiles away from connecting my chain to a temple at the other end and I had three streets in my possession. Much to everyone’s surprise and chagrin, I completed my chain on my very next turn for the win. Thank you Doug, for being an unintentional decoy. I’m quite positive that nobody will let that happen again!

Results: Susan in first, followed by Mark/Mike/Doug

Early on in Attika.

The Ark of the Covenant

The primordial soup was still flourishing on the other table, so we decided to try yet another version of Carcassonne, The Ark of the Covenant. Just how many of these are theoretically possible? I was hesitant to try yet another, being burned out on the whole lot of them, but I’m glad they insisted. This may be the best version of the game yet, fixing a few things and adding new twists.

The first annoyance from the original that AotC fixes is the monasteries. In the original game, these simply boiled down to who was lucky enough to draw them. In this new version they are now called temples. Not only are they now worth a maximum of seven points, the owner is not necessarily the player lucky enough to draw it and park a meeple on it. The person who has the most followers (meeples) on the four tiles orthogonally adjacent to and including the temple tile controls the temple. The temple scores when the last of these tiles is placed. Other elements completed from the tile being placed are scored first and their followers removed like always. So, in this way you can steal the majority from another player.

The second fix involves the Big Meeple from the expansion. He counts as two meeples and it annoys the heck out of me when somebody steals a majority from me with this big fellow. Well, in AotC, he is now the Prophet (we dubbed him Moses). Instead of counting as two followers, he simply earns his owner double points for the city if it is finished and he has the majority. So, if his owner shares the majority with another player, the other player still gets normal points. A definite improvement, I think, removing the sting a bit. The Prophet did cause big swings in points in our game. Getting your prophet in a valuable city and finishing it looks to be very important.

Like Hunter and Gatherers, AotC has simple farmer scoring with none of the confusion of the original game. These are fields with flocks of sheep that count two points each for the controlling shepherd, and wolves that eat one sheep.

The Ark is a totally new twist. If a player doesn’t place a follower on his turn, he may move the Ark up to five tiles, with each follower passed getting a point for its owner. This is rather a nice mechanism that mitigates some of the bad luck of useless tile draws and/or having all your followers stuck on the board. It also brings up decisions on whether or not to try and clump your followers together or spread them out. I’m looking forward to trying different strategies with this.

Anyhow, I did okay, but not great in this game. I did get the satisfaction of stealing a temple from Doug, although I had to share the points with Mark. I think we scored each sheep incorrectly as one point instead of two, which would have probably added about ten points to my score.

Results: Mark 96, Doug 90, Susan 67, Mike 54

The Ark of the Covenant in action. Very yellow.

Other game played: Ursuppe

Amoeba breeders Helen, Rick, Jon, Ed and Robert shepherd their "flocks" in Ursuppe.

Follow the trials and tribulations of those struggling Ursuppe amoebas.

For more pictures from this gaming session and others, see our Gaming Picture Gallery.

Kids of Catan Review

by Susan Rozmiarek
I have posted a review of Kids of Catan, designed by Klaus Teuber and published by Mayfair Games. If you have young children, you should definitely check it out.