Old MB treasures, Spiel des Jahres, and Hanging Gardens

I was mindlessly surfing Craigslist and noticed someone with a bunch of old games from the 1970s and early 80s for sale at almost thrift store prices. Most of them were old kiddie roll-and-move games, but we managed to score some MB classics - King Oil (a childhood favorite of Ed's), Domination, Conspiracy, and Pathfinder. Domination (Focus) fills one of two holes in our Spiel des Jahres collection so that was a nice find. Despite the huge collection of glitzy German games, I still get a thrill from finding treasures in old battered boxes. Now to find people willing to look beyond the flimsy bits and cheesy covers and play them with me....

Speaking of the Spiel des Jahres, the nomination list is newly out and confirms how I'm not keeping up with the gaming world these days. I have played none on the nominees and I haven't even heard of one of them - Blox. Of the others, I only have a real interest in playing Stone Age and maybe Keltis. So, no prediction from me as to who will win. I do only slightly better with the recommended list, having played 3/12 with plans to play several of the others. It was nice to see Agricola given a special award. Yes, I've actually played it and it's even preordered.

One of those recommended games is Hanging Gardens, a recent impulse purchase from our FLGS. Ed and I gave it a whirl last night and quite liked it. It's a spatial, puzzle-type game of the sort we both enjoy. There's not much player interaction though, other than grabbing a card or scoring tile before the other player gets it. I have a hunch that this is going to be much more strategic with two. I can't see that there is going to be much looking ahead with more players.

Tomorrow is our big Memorial Day cookout and game day so I should have pictures and something to talk about here next week. I'm hoping to try out Brass and the new expansion to Pillars of the Earth.

Oh, one more thing - Monastery by the Ragnar Brothers is now up for preorder at Boulder Games. w00t! You can bet I was one of the first in line. I hope it arrives ashore soon.

King of Siam

I twisted my brain into knot this past week learning King of Siam. The rules are quite simple. Trying to foresee the ramifications of your moves is not. I sat down to play this expecting another dull, dry exercise of pushing cubes around to achieve area majorities and instead was fully engaged and intrigued for about an hour. Given my propensities for dice-laden games full of plastic these days, it is quite a feat for a game of this type to captivate me like this. Is it ever D-R-Y.

What I like:

- Nobody owns the various factions vying for control for regions on the board. Instead, you are trying to manipulate them in your favor. I know there are other games like this (Imperial, which I haven't played yet) but this is a fresh and fascinating mechanism for me.

- Everyone has the exact same set of eight different actions to do in the game and there are eight rounds. You can do as many as you want in a given round but that's all you have for the entire game. So if you get sucked into a particular battle early on and spend too many actions, you'll find yourself short of things to do later. Figuring out when it's worth it makes for tough decisions. I found myself in a powerful position during the last few rounds because I had the most actions left.

- I said there are eight rounds but that is not exactly true. There is a sudden death condition that, if it occurs, ends the game immediately with a game winning condition that is contrary to the winning condition if it ends the normal way. It wasn't a threat in this one game but if it is in others, it'll be very interesting. I wonder if driving for this end is a viable strategy? If you were planning for it and it didn't happen, you might be hosed.

- The heart of the game is a clever, clever paradox. At the end of the game, you want to have the most influence of the faction that has won the most regions on the board. But in collecting this influence during the course of the game, you are weakening that faction's position on the board. This can be a tough balancing act.

I was pretty flummoxed with how the game progressed. Some of my actions became pretty useless and I didn't see it coming at all. It'll be interesting to play it again and see if I can get a handle on it. It sure packs a punch in under an hour and players who like games with no luck should love it. We played with three, but the four-player game is with partners. That might be pretty interesting as well.

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Dang. Apologies to Mark Gim. The spam filter snared your comment on the previous post and I only just noticed. Sorry! Thanks for your comment.

Retro Gaming

We've been going "retro" lately and pulling out some of the lunchtime golden oldies from our collection. How do these light-to-middleweight games that play in under an hour hold up now? Fairly well, actually, although that may be nostalgia talking. All four of these games were popular in my group around the year 2000 and 2001, when we were overtaken with the eurogaming craze. They have all come out sporadically since then, but not much (if at all) in recent years.

Today's offering was Rheinlander, a Knizia game from 1999. We were happy when Face2Face Games decided to republish this as we'd never managed to get a copy of the older Hasbro version. It's an area control game in which you play numbered cards to place knights in the corresponding regions along the Rhine River in order to form duchies. The game still holds up well today and I still like it quite a bit. It's very tactical in nature but you can do some planning and hope you get the right cards. Luck dependent to be sure, but the deck will most likely get shuffled a couple of times, making played cards possibly available again. A feature that I really like is that the rules for expanding allow you to use any card in your hand, often giving you something useful to do even if you don't pull the cards you really want.

Manhattan is another game with teeth that can be played in under an hour and proves that Andreas Seyfarth had at least one solid design in him long before Puerto Rico. This is also an area majority game but this time players are competing to own the most floors of individual skyscrapers and the most floors in an entire city. The board depicts several cities, each a 3X3 grid of building locations. Players have sets of building pieces that have differing numbers of floors. Before each round, they get to decide what pieces they are going to build that round. Cards are played to place the pieces, stacking them on the building site. The cards show on which building spot the piece must be placed, but the player gets to choose the city. This game can get pretty tense with a lot of direct head-butting. I can't believe that I once thought that this game was too mean. I rather enjoy it now. I still haven't played with the Godzilla variant.

Samarkand is a Sid Sackson game about traveling through the desert and buying and trading goods at nomad camps and oases. You are trying to collect sets of goods and then sell them at designated locations on the board. Movement is often determined by a dice roll, but you usually have a choice of direction. You'll have to do the action of the spot on which you land and this will require constant hand and money management. That and the route planning involved makes this still a rather fun, light game.

Café International is perhaps the weakest of this bunch. This is a tile-laying game of seating restaurant patrons at tables and scoring points as you do. Apparently, these people all prefer to sit at tables with others of their nationality and in equal numbers of each gender. This is purely a tactical game of drawing tiles and trying to spot your optimal moves. I loved this easy, gentle sort of game back when first discovering German games but it feels a bit lacking now. The art is quite a hoot though, with its stereotyping, and it is a pleasant game in which to socialize over lunch.

Looking over our shelves, we still have quite a number of older games to return to and see if they still have that spark. Hopefully, I'll have some more of these posts soon.

New Settlers of Catan Meetup

Due to the previously mentioned burnout and springtime demands on my time, this poor blog has been very quiet. It's time to wake it up again, perhaps with smaller postings more in line with my busy lifestyle. (edit: This did not turn out to be a "smaller" posting but I couldn't stop once I started to the detriment of the chores that I should be doing instead. Oh, well)

In News of the Blogosphere, let me say that I'm glad that I'm lazy and don't clean up things like out-of-date subscriptions in my newsreader. If I did, I would have never seen the new post on Chris Farrell's long abandoned blog pointing people to his new one. Chris' critical game reviews are some of the best I've ever read. I don't always agree with him but he often sees a game in a totally different way than I do which makes for very entertaining and thought provoking reading.

My gaming time has also taken a hit lately as well, which I hope to rectify in the coming summer as things quiet down. Hopefully, Ed and I can start attending our old, regular Thursday group again. We have been going to the monthly, local Meetup group which continues to grow quite large and diverse. I am often torn between hand-holding the noobs through their first game of Ticket to Ride or getting up a game of what I really want to be playing with the seasoned gamers. Fortunately, I still adore Ticket to Ride so it's all good. This group is on hiatus through the summer but to fill its place there is now the.....

Settlers of Catan Meetup group. It seems that there is a wave of newbies here being sucked into the vortex of eurogaming through the magic of Settlers and they've organized a dedicated group. Does that game have some invisible aura around it that I just can't see? I'm simply amazed at its gateway powers. I will admit that the card game version is partially responsible for sucking me into the hobby, but by the time I got around to playing the basic game, I'd already cut my teeth on the likes of Euphrat & Tigris, Elfenland, and El Grande and they excited me a lot more. BUT, I do start to realize the magic of Settlers with the addition of new twists and chrome like those in the historical scenarios and major overhauls like in Settlers of the Stone Age. There are still so many that I haven't played yet and I'm hoping that with this group I'll be able to work my way through them. Shoot, I still have the entire Das Buch to explore. We also hope to introduce people to a few other games besides Settlers.

The first meeting of the Settlers group went well. There was a lot of interest but unfortunately, attendance was limited due to the small venue. There were two tables going and Ed and I played a basic game with the group's organizers. They had been trying to play the game with just two and were quite enthused to be playing it for the first time with more. We felt that it would be rude to foist our house rule on our host's first game so we did not play with the Food Stamp Variant. I have said over and over how I refuse to play Settlers without this variant and once again proved that I need to live by my convictions.

After a dismal, resource-scarce game, Ed abandoned Settlers and broke out our copy of Pandemic that we had smuggled in and taught it to our hosts. It went over very well. I joined the other table to play Cities & Knights at the urging of a seasoned Settlers player who insisted that this was the only way to play and that I would never go back. Well, I wouldn't say that, but I did like this expansion quite a bit. Believe it or not, I had never played it despite the fact it has been on our shelves for years. What I liked in particular was the city development and the way it is tied into city resource production. Development cards are now much more a part of the game. I could have done without some of the added bits but on the whole I though they all added more decisions and flavor to the game. I do have one big caveat, though. I had to leave early and we only played about half the game. One of the biggest criticisms I've heard leveled at Cities & Knights is the increased length and I didn't get to experience that to judge for myself.

The organizers have secured a bigger place and the second meeting is next weekend on a day we can actually make it. Will our interest in Settlers hold? Will we be able to introduce them to other games and expand our gaming opportunities? Stay tuned.