Game Day Report for October 15, 2006

by Susan Rozmiarek

Alongside the buildup to Essen, the exciting first photos, and now the flurry of reports to pore over, gaming goes on as usual thousands of miles away in the middle of Texas. We finally were able host a game day and actually play a few of those games being hyped in far away countries.

While we're talking about conventions, I have to report the very sad news that Ed and I have decided not to attend BGG.con. After looking at all the hurdles and hoops we'd have to try and get over and through, it just isn't worth the effort. After all the hassle, we'd probably only get in one full day of gaming on Saturday. Next year Shea will be old enough to attend and that will eliminate a few of the problems. Sigh.

Leonardo da Vinci

(yet again)

We took this for an outing with the full complement of five players and I've about come to the conclusion that while this is a decent game, it is not really for me. With this many players the competition on the board was fierce in every location, making is very hard to plan and execute a strategy. I still haven't decided if it is better to place workers first (for the tiebreaker advantage) or last (so as not to over commit too early). My tendency in the beginning was the latter, hoping for cheap leftover scraps to then see what I can do with them, a favored technique of mine in other games. But in Leonardo there are too many dogs fighting over the scraps every round. With three players the game was definitely kinder and gentler so this approach worked better. I predict that members of the GGG (Gamer's Game Gamers) are going to have a grand time picking this one apart and I'll be in the front row watching with interest, particularly for anything to do with optimal strategies. Each game ends with me feeling woefully inefficient and wanting to try a new approach next time. So, there is still much for me to explore in the game but I'm not sure that I can overcome the feelings of frustration that sap the fun out of playing. I can only take a certain amount of player interaction in a serious game of planning and so far Leonardo exceeds my limits. I don't like to be messed over constantly by other players, especially if I can't predict it. This is probably why I vastly prefer Princes of Florence. And now that I think about, that is probably part of my problem with Age of Steam. At any rate, I might attempt to write a full review of the Leonardo over the next week or two and attempt to gather up and expand on my thoughts. It will be difficult as I don't feel like I have a good grasp of the game, at least not as much as I would like.

Some observations after this playing:

- I need to try the advance setup where you get to choose your extra starting goodies. We've only played with the beginner's setup. I suffered with having the fewest starting workers in a previous game and watched Ed deal with the same this time. Which leads me too...........

- In every game that I've played, everyone immediately gets sucked into a vicious struggle to recruit more workers. You feel like you have to keep up at least so it's hard to not to get sucked into this battle right away. I wonder if ignoring it at the beginning would be fatal. Probably.

- The winner of our game, Adam, actually chose the action in the council that lets you rearrange the top of the invention card deck. This is the first time I've seen this done and I'm wondering if getting an invention started before it comes out is a good strategy. This is yet another thing I want to try myself.

- It seems quite important to set up for the endgame rounds of just working on current inventions. I tried to do this and just needed to acquire a few particular resources to have both my labs complete a final invention. I committed a good number of workers immediately to those locations to get the tiebreaker advantage and saved some money just in case I wasn't in first. On the latter location, someone came behind me and took first place (still okay) but then I got hosed out of second by the council action. I was one dollar short of being able to get that resource and finish the invention. Had I been able to complete it, I would have gotten almost 20 extra dollars (payout and endgame bonus) and won the game. Very frustrating.

Susan, Adam, Mike, Mark and Ed (taking photo) play Leonardo da Vinci.

Canal Mania

I finally, finally, FINALLY got to play this game. After waiting nearly two months for our copy to arrive off the slow boat from England while everyone who ordered it stateside was playing and raving about it, I finally got to play it myself. Normally this would set me up for The Big Letdown but fortunately this was not the case. My huge, inflated expectations were met. The description of this game being a combination of the best parts of Ticket to Ride and Age of Steam is spot-on. I loved the little feelings of accomplishment throughout the game of completing canals. I loved the fact that even though it might cost an action, you could always get the engineer you needed. I loved the constraints on building, both in types of canals and the maximum length allowed. And finally, I loved having several, but not overly many ways to score points. In fact, I loved the whole game which is not surprising given my great fondness for train games.

I don't know what it is about Ragnar Brothers games but I'm completely charmed by them. So charmed, in fact, that I'm willing to overlook things that many perceive as flaws - the dice in Viking Fury, the random weather screwage in More Backpacks and Blisters, and the down time in Kings & Castles. Their games just feel a little bit different and more original than anything else I play. I vaguely remember a conversation on an internet forum about how British games are different from American or German games but I don't think anyone was able to figure out exactly what that difference is. I'm not sure I would even recognize it when I see it. But, it's there.

Canal building is well underway in Canal Mania.

Weinhändler

I'm enjoying this one, although not quite as much as the similar game, Money. The constraint of the fixed way of distributing winning bids, rather than the players choosing as in Money makes for some different nuances. It takes a game or two to see these. The spatial aspects of building your wine cellar are pleasant, but I'm not sure that I like the fact that the hand limit forces you to build and tip off players to exactly what you are collecting. Then again, this introduces more nuances as you might present a tasty bid to encourage an opponent not to outbid you. Money is much more secretive and allows you to pull off nasty surprises at the end when you lay down unexpected sets. Hmmmm. Now I can't decide which game is superior. At any rate, Money is long out of print and Weinhändler is readily available and I can at least say with confidence that it's a decent substitute.

Look at my beautiful cellar stacked with fine wines.

Silk Road

Good grief. The rules to this game are only two pages long! With all the new games we've been learning, the simplicity of this new one was a nice break. This is a game of moving a caravan along a path and getting stuff to trade for even more stuff or sell for money, hopefully. Each city has different choices of actions, one less than the number of players. So, one player is going to get hosed out of doing anything each round, but will be in the driver's seat for the auction next round. The driver's seat means that he will have the last bid of the once around auction with the option to pass and get paid the winning bid. The winner of the auction gets to choose in which direction the caravan will move and then has first pick of the actions at that location. He then chooses who will go next and that player chooses and takes an action and then picks the next player and so on. I was really apprehensive of the rules for choosing the next player as I envisioned much meta-gaming and favoritism. You worry about these things while playing with your spouse. Nobody wants to sleep on the couch! However, I was surprised at how well it actually works as your decision is often based on trying to jockey for position in the next auction or trying to deprive a particular player of a certain action based on what you think he has collected behind his screen. Yes, there is a bit of a memory element which I imagine is easier with fewer players. In our four player game, I had a pretty good general idea who had the most of a commodity and I'm certainly not known for having a good memory. There is some look-ahead and money management as you'll want to have first choice in certain upcoming auctions to guarantee a particular action at a certain location. All-in-all, not a hard game but a very enjoyable one with enough tension to keep me interested.

Silk Road in progress. That giant, looming log is the caravan. I think that I'd run away screaming in terror if that thing rolled into my town!

Upgrade complete

by Ed Rozmiarek

The blog software is complete and the comments have been reenabled. Right now, comments are open to anyone. I will be adding some form of authentication soon. I just need to determine what type I want to use.

If you see any weirdness with the posts on the site, well, weirdness related to the formatting, link and such, drop me a line. Otherwise, comment with care.

Update: I have installed the Comment E-mail Filter plugin for additional filtering of the blog comments. This provides a white list and ban list for comments based on e-mail addresses. Hopefully, this plus the built-in spam filtering in Movable Type 3.x will provide a decent level of protection from comment spam. I know I can turn on the Typekey authentication but I think that might keep people who have not registered and don't want to from commenting. I have preloaded the white list with about 25-30 e-mail address from the recent commenters so we'll see how it goes.

Game Rambles

by Susan Rozmiarek
The only reason there is something to read here today is because my bike has a flat tire and something is wrong with my pump or tire or both. Or maybe it's just that I'm a woman and incapable of dealing with such things. Whatever. At any rate, here I am killing a beautiful afternoon inside in front of a computer.

Another game night was hosted by John G. at his church. Since most in attendance are non- or not-quite-gamers, it is a perfect opportunity to bring out an older, lighter favorite. Since most of the folks have never heard of any of the games we bring, there are no arguments. Too bad my regular group won't let me dictate what we play all the time! Just as in grade school, we separated into boy and girl tables and the game I chose for the "girls" was Expedition, a favorite from way back when I was a not-quite-gamer myself. What ensued was a very enjoyable, leisurely game that would have had most hardcore gamers crawling up the walls and tearing their hair out. We chatted, we made our moves, we chatted some more, we pointed out clever moves for each other and we graciously allowed people to claim locations they (oops) missed. The game went over really well and the German text on the cards did not bother anybody but me, always burning with curiosity about those exotic locations. Like another favorite of mine, Elfenland, Expedition suffers from too many rules variants floating around. Every group seems to insist on a different way to play. Since I was teaching it we played (ha!) MY way which is that you must play off the loop you formed, not anywhere off the expedition. The latter way makes life too easy and we can't have that, even with newbie players. We also got in a round or two of Poison and Ubongo to complete a very pleasant and laid back evening.

John G. also hosted games on Monday and I joined him, Gina and Mark for a few games:

Leonardo da Vinci: This was my second playing of the game and just as intriguing as the first. Why am I so awful at this type of game? With three beginners and me still clueless, I don't think any of us played all that optimally. We all went for and fought viciously over the additional workers and lab upgrades and were very slow completing inventions. So much for the beginner's setup that is in theory supposed to nudge us toward different paths. I'm actually looking forward to trying the advanced setup where we get to pick our extra starting goodies. I started with only three workers and didn't like the deficit one bit. I also stacked the invention deck slightly incorrectly but I don't think my mistake had much, if any, impact.

Blue Moon City: Another second playing for me. I thought the game was much tenser than my earlier two-player game. The endgame was extremely close with everyone just about able to win. The problem is by completing a last building to get the crystals you need to win, you are probably setting up another player to win before you get another turn. I seem to remember others complaining about this on the gaming forums. Still, it's fun and fast to play so far. In my two games, I've taken the approach of using the cards I have to dictate which buildings to go for, and not discarding many cards. I'm wondering if it would be wiser to assess the board more closely and target certain buildings whether or not I have the cards, discarding in the hopes of drawing the correct ones. I'll have to try that. There were some very valuable buildings that I ignored because I didn't have the right cards.

Weinhändler: This is a very tricky little card game that reminded me of Knizia's Money but with a spatial aspect thrown in as you use the wine cards you are collecting to build personal pyramid-shaped wine cellars with bonus points for certain configurations. I thought it rather clever, perhaps too clever for me. I'm looking forward to playing it more to see if I can figure it out.

Some more rambling:

The single panel comics on BGG have been hilarious. A lot of people might be able to relate to the most recent one. Of course, nobody has to grovel in this household (at least for games ;-)).

Mike Siggins has recently posted two excellent columns on Funagain.com, here and here. He pretty much nailed my first impressions of Emira. I have to remember to swing by Funagain more often to see if he's posted anything new. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an RSS feed which I suppose would defeat Funagain's probable purpose of getting people to visit their front page.

It's time to drag out all those bad Halloween games and inflict them on my (un)willing victims. Betrayal at House on the Hill, Zombies!!! and my all-time favorite, The Gothic Game. C'mon, you only have to play them once a year!

I was in Barnes & Nobles the other evening and saw a display of games for sale on a table with the National Games Week sign. Surprisingly, the selection included Rheinlander, Puerto Rico, Settlers of Catan, Shear Panic, and Tsuro to name a few. I wonder how many of those they will sell or will they just make a bunch of game geeks happy when they later go on clearance?

I am currently wishing that I lived in Europe and could hop in my car in a week or two and just drive a few hours to Essen. It's hard for me to fathom being a day's drive or less to multiple countries when it takes at least three hours for me to even get out of my own state (Texas). We are only a half day's drive (or less) from Mexico but last time I checked there weren't any major game conventions there. Sigh. At least we now have BGG.con.

Software upgrade coming

by Ed Rozmiarek
I'm going to be upgrading the blogging software we use sometime over the next couple of days. In preparation for this, I will be disabling blog comments until the upgrade is complete. I want to block the spammers so they are not making changes to the database during the upgrade. I don't think this will have much of an impact since the number of real comments has been very low lately.

I'll post again when the upgrade is complete and comments have been reenabled.

Bison Review

by Susan Rozmiarek
I've posted a review of Bison, a new game published by Mayfair Game and designed by that dynamic designer duo, Kramer & Kielsling. As such, my expectations were high but I was not disappointed even though I am deathly tired of area majority control games. Bison has a resource management aspect that I enjoyed which made the game for me.

Leonardo Da Vinci - First Impressions

by Susan Rozmiarek
We got to try Leonardo Da Vinci this past weekend, a game which is soon to be released by Mayfair and daVinci Games. It is already getting some love on BoardgameGeek and I’ll bet the buzzing will really pick up after the Essen fair in a few weeks.

This is the game that Emira wanted to be, or should I say the game that *I* wanted Emira to be since some people seem to like Emira just fine as is. Both are the type of snowballing games where you start building up the “engine” that by game end you hope will have you pulling in the victory points/money/pretty princesses/whatever. However, unlike my first and only playing so far of Emira, here I felt like I had more control and more options to pursue. Not only that, but Leonardo’s many, many little auctions are cleverly disguised within the theme without all the tedium of Emira’s. However, Emira’s fun and original harem theme beats that of Leonardo hands down. Do we really need yet another game about Renaissance Italy? Please. Spare me! Fortunately, the game is quite engaging and the mechanics fit the theme well so all is forgiven.

I have to confess, it took me three tries reading through the rules before I was ready to play. Some of the explanations were really confusing. Not only reading the FAQ but also remembering it too is an absolute must as I found out to my detriment.

Players are Renaissance inventors competing for fame and fortune but mostly fortune in Florence, Italy. A central game board depicts the city and its various locations. Players have their own personal little boards representing their two laboratories. They also have wooden apprentice meeples and one master who counts as two apprentices when played. Players will be trying to complete requested inventions that will require certain resources and a number of weeks to complete. They will earn florins when they complete an invention; more if they are the first to do so. As the game progresses, the inventions get more valuable, but require more resources and more weeks to complete. In fact, the invention deck is stacked before the game to insure this which is fiddly but important. Nice little player aides summarize the inventions and what they require so you’ll know what is possibly coming up. Players send apprentices to various locations on the board to upgrade their lab, get more apprentices, and collect the various types of resources. These are all little once-around auctions going on simultaneously with apprentices as the bidding currency. On your turn during this phase, you may place any number of apprentices on a location. You can never add more to that particular location that round with the exception of your master or vice versa. You can also place apprentices on your laboratories to perform weeks of work. This goes round and round until everyone’s apprentices have been placed. This is quite a neat mechanism as it doesn’t feel like a bunch of auctions. Rather, it feels like you are sending out your men to their work assignments. Next, each location gets resolved. The player who placed the most apprentices (ties broken in favor of who placed first) gets that location’s action or resource for free while subsequent players must pay increasing costs. The council location allows a player to perform one of four various special actions.

The winner is the player who collects the most florins. As a nice twist, there are rewards at the end of the game for completing different types of inventions as denoted by a symbol on the corner of the card. However, if you complete the same types of invention during the game, the cost in weeks to do so goes down, making a nice dilemma as to which inventions to try to complete. Oh, did I mention that if more than one player completes an invention on the same round there is a closed fist auction to see who gets the card. More angst! There are too many things to do and not enough manpower to get them done.

I’ve left out some things, but that’s the gist. You’ll have to wait for a formal review for the rest after I’ve played it a few more times.

Ed, Shea and I decided to use the beginner setup which gives everyone variable numbers of starting resources, labs, apprentices and florins. I think this nudges players into different starting strategies. Ed the Wise immediately concentrated on long term goals and committed his manpower towards getting more apprentices and upgrading his labs. I started with an upgraded lab so I focused on the short term goal of completing the cheap inventions that were available. So did Shea, who also was quite entranced with the council and its special actions, particularly the one which allowed him to move a worker to another location and thereby overtake someone else’s high bid, usually mine. What he didn’t do early on was get more apprentices and hence more bidding power which hurt him, I think. I made several fatal errors that involved the endgame. I didn’t do the necessary upgrades to my laboratories to complete the higher cost inventions available in the last rounds and I didn’t fully understand how the last two rounds worked (clarified in the FAQ). Shea and I were distant losers to Ed, who was able to complete a final, valuable invention. Yes, I was dead last behind a ten year old kid. He was able to complete more different types of inventions than me. Boy, did I really mess up at the end!

Leonardo appears to have all the required hallmarks of a good game of this type. Fans of “gamer’s games” should be pleased. There seem to be multiple strategies to pursue and you have to decide between long and short term goals. To accomplish those, you’ll have to spend some of the money that you are trying to collect to win which makes for some tough decisions. I’m interested in seeing how the game works with more players. There were a lot of inventions that never got turned up. I imagine the competition for them will be brutal with more players.

By-the way, our game clocked in at very reasonable 60 minutes.

Leonardo Da Vinci board mid round.

Meta-post on comment spam

by Ed Rozmiarek
Blog comment spam, the bane to my existence right now. The amount of comment spam we are getting these days is just staggering (stats later). The blacklist tool we use helps a lot, but the number of new comments that gets through the filters keeps up at a fairly constant pace, probably about 20 a day. Sometimes over a 100 or more get through a day. I know I need to upgrade to the latest level of Movable Type to get the new comment filtering tools. I plan to do that someday soon pending just having the free time.

One new type of comment spam that we have been getting a lot of recently is blogspot spam. These comments using URLs based on blogspot.com and redirect to a link farm or some other spam related site. After doing some reading, it seems these have been around for a while but we have just started getting hit with them in the last couple months. It appears that the number of these is growing and are not being controlled by Blogspot.

This problem has caused me to break down and add “blogspot.com” to the blacklist. I know there are a few regular readers & commenters that have real, valid blogs hosted by Blogspot. By adding blogspot.com to the blacklist will block these people from adding links to their blogs when they comment. For this, I apologize in advance. However, until Blogspot can figure out a way to stop spammers and link farmers from co-oping their redirection service, blogspot will remain on the blacklist. Why? Early results show the scale of the problem. In the first 12+ hours after I added blogspot to the blacklist, over 130 comments have been blocked. In fact, 5, no, make that 9, new ones from blogspot have been blocked since I started writing this blog entry. Sigh…

Speaking of stats, how bad is this whole problem? I ran some stats on the number of spam comments that have been blocked this year. Since the start of the year, the blacklist filter has blocked over 11,500 comments, an average of over 42 a day. September was really bad with 3416 blocked comment (about 114 a day). Today is October 2 and we have already blocked 416 comments this month. Just incredible.

For fun, I created a chart to track the numbers. Here’s the graph of the problem.

So, again, I’m sorry to those people with valid Blogspot blogs, but blogspot.com will remain on the blacklist for now.