Entries Tagged 'Board Games' ↓

Yesterday I played Power Grid for the first time and was not massively impressed by it.  Mistress S, myself, and some other MIT grad students played a 5 player game on the map of Germany, which added a bit of spice to the game for me since it meant I got to flex my geography muscles and practice my German pronunciation. I found the game itself to be a bit too dry for my tastes however, despite our particular session having a very close ending in which I was pipped at the post by a mere 4 Electros.

I think that ultimately what it comes down to is that I didn’t dig the theme that much, and the fine game mechanics couldn’t make up for this fact.  Another turn off was the constant mental arithmetic.  I don’t mind the odd spot of mental computation, but when I’m adding up slews of numbers written on the board, rather than simply tallying up the number of abstract pieces or resources that I’m going to get, the math becomes a bit too intrusive for my tastes.  That said however, the game really is quite elegantly designed and has interesting mechanics that advantage players whose board position is relatively weak, with the result that to play optimally you’re sometimes better off making worse plays than you otherwise might in order to make sure you avoid the “shaft the winner” mechanics.

I’ve been avoiding playing this game with the more experienced folks at Pandemonium and MIT’s Strategic Gamers because my suspicion was that it is not newbie friendly, and from reading BGG on the topic that sounds about right.  The game is all about making optimally efficient decisions, which strongly punishes players who can’t anticipate things like what a certain power plant will really be worth to them in the long run.  As such I’d happily play again with people who’ve only had one or two games like myself, but wont be playing it with more experienced players any time soon, and didn’t enjoy it enough to want to get my skill level up to the point where I’d be competitive with experienced people.

There aint nothing better to do on a lazy Sunday than to game your little heart out. Things got rolling with a visit to City Hunter Bondi Junction by myself, Mistress S, Fluffy, and MadA. There we had the awful and typical experience of finding none of the stuff that we wanted set up on the computers and it taking a good hour of our paid time to establish that it didn’t work. We ended up complaining bitterly to the manager, who decently gave us free time, but it was still damn annoying. We switched tack and played Unreal Tournament 2004 in Mutant mode, where one player is the mutant who has to kill everyone else but gets souped up with speed and partial invisibility. I turned out to be in the FPS zone and won a good deal of the matches before we switched to Bombing Run, where teams compete to take a ball and put it in their opposing team’s goal. The instagib mutator made it ridiculously fast paced and a hell of a lot of fun. It hearkened back to the good old day of gibalicious deathmatch action.

After computer gaming I headed over to Cura’s for some board gaming action and got in another game of Starcraft with Danoot, MadA, Cura, and Illya. The game took 5 hours to complete including learning, which was largely due to Illya’s analysis paralysis and difficulty with the rules. The other caught on really quickly, but for some reason it just didn’t stick with Illya. Cura rushed Illya’s base but was repelled by a solid force of Zealots. Danoot expanded twice and so did MadA, taking advantage of the fact that Cura and Illya were not going for their naturals. I was too far away from everyone to do anything other than expand to my natural.

Z-axis switcherooing saw Cura and MadA suddenly become neighbours, with MadA’s home base totally undefended. MadA managed to pull his troops back home in time to stop any of Cura’s shenanigans. I snuck in a Zergling to kill random some workers, annoying MadA in the process. Danoot managed to hold a ridiculous 5 worth of control points and put himself neatly within 2 turns of winning, which I pointed out to Cura, who helped me punish him for his overextension, but not before he had managed to rack himself up 10 VPs.

With Danoot subdued, MadA was still in control of 3 planets with a large ground force. Illya attacked his baseless outpost and wiped out his expeditionary force. MadA streamed units into my home planet and assaulted my home base, killing my defenders but losing a lot of attackers in the process. I then counter-attacked and took back the base before the end of the turn, avoiding losing it. The final phase 2 event was drawn, putting us into endgame with both me and Illya achieving our special victory conditions, but I with more victory points I took the win.

The game was interesting because it was a lower tech game than any of the previous ones we’ve had, with much more constant fighting from start to finish. I managed to get to Ultralisks, but not until the final turn, and MadA managed to get Mutalisks, but they weren’t decisive since I had Hydralisks to counter them. As a result the combats felt a lot less one-sided than the Battle Cruiser vs Zergling fights that we’ve had in the past. I really want to try more mid-tech builds, in particular Dragoons and Reavers seem like they would be great. I still don’t see the point in building Scourge.

I gave Starcraft: The Board Game another spin today. Percy, Valenos, and I were starting up a three player game, when Cura called and said he wanted in, so he scooted over to my place and we gave him a super condensed, front loaded rules explanation and then jumped into it. Rules explanation went much faster this time round, and I used the time honoured tactic of getting the person who has most recently learned them, Percy in this case, to explain them to the newbie, which helps firm things in for the teacher too. It turns out we’d been playing things wrong in the last game, where we exposed the top order on a stack, when it should actually stay face down until executed, so this time around we made sure we did it right.

I was hugely favoured by the set up, which gave me an uncontested planet and buffer planets between each of my closest neighbours. I was also playing Arcturus Mensk, who has to control 2 planets for a victory, so with my inaccessible planet and my home planet things were looking good. Valenos had buffer planets, but no safe expansion, and was connected to Cura by a Z-axis link. Cura started out right next to Percy, also joined by a Z-axis link, and charged into him right off the bat. He succumbed to diplomacy however, refraining from attacking Percy’s base and possibly ousting him, instead choosing to deny resources. All thing considered, he should have punished Percy’s incautious play and ousted him, but it would have made for a boring game for Percy.

As the game progressed, Percy expanded into the buffer planet between my home and his. Valenos expanded towards Cura but was harassed by Cura’s Zerglings and Hydralisks, losing control of the planet’s resources. I power boomed my economy, ignoring units and triple building in turn 2 to get to Battle Cruisers by turn 3. Valenos moved a Zergling in to claim the victory point location on the buffer planet between our bases and prepare the way for the third base he would need to claim his special victory condition.

Turn 3 came around and we were almost into the stage 3 events due to so many actions being blocked and players choosing to draw event cards rather than take thwarted actions, which meant special victory conditions were about to come online. I built Battle Cruisers, supported by a Science Vessel that I had built the previous turn, and flew in to blow away Valenos’ Zergling who had been considering base building. I left one Cruiser on each the planet’s two sections, guaranteeing that I’d hold it against the few AA forces that Valenos had. Valenos suffered an attack on his other front, with the lone Zergling holding off Cura succumbing to the Overmind’s swarms and his base being overrun. In retaliation Valenos invaded Cura’s now empty home planet and occupied every region, preventing him from building to defend himself. Percy built up an invasion force to push me off my victory condition planets, but it didn’t look like he was going to be able to do it in time.

By the end of the turn we had gone through half of the phase 3 event cards, which turned out to be enough to resolve both The End Is Near events, drawing the game to an end and leaving Percy as the winner, via his special victory condition. It was an unexpected ending, but I felt it was fair, given that Valenos and I were both certainly within striking distance of our victory conditions on the next turn. Event cards had been drawn more frequently in that game than in any of the previous games I’d seen, so we really should have taken into account the possibility that the game could end at any moment and pushed harder for a quick win or to crush Percy. Cura felt the game had been a bit short, but given that it took a little under 3 hours from start to finish I thought it was a reasonable length. I would love to play again and see some more of the tier 2 units being used. The final victory point tally was roughly Illykai: 10, Percy: 9, Valenos and Cura: 5.

Mistress S, Biodecay, DA, and Kharn all pitched in to buy me Starcraft: The Boardgame for my birthday this week, which I wasn’t at all expecting and was thrilled to receive. I was itching to give it a burl, and when my prior plans for Sunday fell through I did a quick ring around and rustled up 5 players to join me in a battle for the fate of the galaxy. SC:TBG is a very lavishly produced affair, with scads of tokens, cards, and nicely sculpted plastic miniatures, making for a slightly fiddly, but very satisfying aesthetic experience. The actual gameplay itself seemed well designed and developed after two plays, although the rules were pretty involved which bogged things down at first. I played one 6 player game about 2/3 of the way through and a 3 player game through to completion. The 3 player game was great fun, but the 6 game experience made it clear that introductory games are best played with 3-4 people.

Setup time was at least half an hour, including punching out cardboard chits, and sorting things out but would probably be around 15 minutes or less now that everything is sorted into my biohazardous waste sample baggies. Rules explanation took a very long time, as it always does on first plays of ameritrash games. Mistress S and Biodecay’s eyes glazed over slightly as my lengthy explanations rambled on, giving rise to the dreaded comment “this is very complicated.” Ultimately I screwed up here, because it’s really not complicated, the core mechanics of the game are remarkably intuitive and once you’ve played one or two rounds you get into the swing of things, but because I hadn’t taught the game before, and wasn’t all that sure of the rules myself, there was a lot of umming and ahhing and referring to the game manual. In the future I’m going to give a demonstration run through a full turn of a mock 2 player game, using all the different kinds of orders and including a combat to demonstrate how all the moving parts fit together.

Rules-wise the game is actually quite straightforward. Players take it in turns to place order tokens face down on the planets which everyone is battling over. The orders on a planet get stacked up on top of one another, with orders higher up being executed before ones lower down in the stack. Once everyone’s put down 4 orders, everyone takes turns revealing an order of theirs and executing it. There are only 3 types of order: Mobilize, which lets you move and start a fight; Build, which lets you make units, transports, workers, and base upgrades; and Research, which gets you more cards, both of the regular and special varieties. With an upgraded base you get access to super versions of the normal orders, which do the same thing, but give a bonus like making your guys better at attacking when their Mobilize order gets them into a fight. The interesting thing is that the stack mechanism means you have to make sure that your orders get revealed in the right order, relative to both your own orders and those of others; for instance you want to make sure that you execute your build order before your opponent executes their mobilize order so that you can have enough troops to mount an effective defense. Combat is a matter of choosing cards from your hand and revealing them simultaneously, with higher valued cards winning the fight but only being playable if you have the correct units in the battle. Research adds extra cards to your deck and to your hand, which let you bend this basic formula and generally cause shenanigans. The game is won by accruing victory points, which you get from controlling certain areas on planets, or alternatively by achieving your race’s special victory condition, which is roughly the same difficulty for everyone.

The 6 player game saw my Protoss overrun by Biodecay’s Zerg, despite managing to tech up to Archons in an attempt to counter his Mutalisks. I expanded too far too early and Bio took advantage of my overextension to punish me and set up his special victory condition. An early battle between Spamy’s Protoss and Mistress S’s Zerg over their closest expansion planet saw both of them weakened relative to the rest of the board and locked in a war that both of them wished would end. Fluffy’s Terrans suffered from some misplaced orders, which prevented him from putting pressure on Valenos’ Terrans, who developed a stranglehold on the two planets he needed for his special victory and let him quickly tech up to Battle Cruisers with Yamato Cannons virtually unimpeded. The game was tense and saw a lot of conflict, but was plagued by slow play and uncertainty over rules. A general sense of frustration hung over the game as Mistress S, who is no fan of rules lawyering, clashed with myself and others whose love of nit-picking is rivaled only by child grooming habits of OCD afflicted monkeys, whilst the game moved forward with the glacial slowness of 6 people battling analysis paralysis. Eventually we had to call it a night because half the players needed to head home in order to be able to get to work at a reasonable hour the next day. Spamy, Valenos, and I decided to give it another crack with 3 players.

With just 3 people and a bit of experience under out belts, the game progressed much faster and was a lot more fun, despite the fact that we were all mentally and physically exhausted by about midway through. I tried pulling the same trick that Bio had pulled on me in the previous game, massing Mutalisks and charging at Spamy’s Terrans before he had an opportunity to prepare himself properly. I had set up my starting planets so that my economy was much stronger than the other players, but at the expense of having no possibility of hitting the number of victory points required for a regular win, meaning I’d have to invade three planets and establish bases on all of them for my special victory condition. On the decisive turn for my attack, I swept into Spamy’s base and massacred the units he had there, which were unable to fight back against my air units. Spamy had been counting on Valenos’ Protoss to maintain pressure on my rear so that I couldn’t fully commit myself, but Valenos had decided to tech instead. Facing units from me that he couldn’t destroy, Spamy instead charged into Valenos’ ill defended territory and harassed his economy. Valenos realized that he had made a mistake in allowing me to push through Spamy with no fear of reprisal and set about massing an army to punish me on the following turn.

On the final turn of the game we all started with a shot at winning. Spamy had been producing 4 VPs a turn from turn 1 and was threatening a regular win unless we could dislodge him. I was about to build a base on a third planet, thereby claiming my special victory condition. Valenos had a sizable assault force massed by my borders ready to claim him enough territory to win via his special victory condition. I struck first, pushing Spamy off one of his VP locations and putting him out of reach of victory by 1 turn. Spamy tried valiantly to rush Valenos’ Archon defended base with stimpacked Marines and Wraiths to eek out a win by taking a VP location to replace the one I stole from him, but the Archon mowed him down. I had tried desperately to prevent an invasion of my natural expansion, but Valenos’ event card from the previous turn gave him the bonus actions that he needed to crush my base there. The strangest part of the turn was that Valenos was able to attack my final region on the expansion planet containing a Zergling and an Ultralisk and, because the attacker chooses who is on the front line, set things up so that the Zergling was fighting an Archon with my Ultralisk forced into a support role. The Zergling was unsurprisingly minced and the splash damage from the Archon killed my Ultralisk, which just goes to show how much of an advantage the attacker gains from the ability to chose who fights whom, but which caught me completely unawares, despite the fact that I had pointed out a different move earlier in the turn that could have triggered a similarly strange fight. Valenos’ final actions gave him the territory he needed for the win. Everyone agreed that it had been a good game, that they had a much better feel for how to play, and also that they’d all had a legitimate shot at winning, which kept things tense and interesting all the way through.

I would rate the game around the same level as A Game of Thrones, perhaps an 8/10, but I haven’t had enough plays to fully grok how the game plays out typically. I’m keen to play a 2v2 game, since I’ve heard that the game shines in that format. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys AGOT and wants to buy a sci-fi themed ameritrash wargame. I think that after a few plays, SC:TBG will get the nod as my 4X board game of choice over the currently reigning Twilight Imperium 3, because it’s far less of a dice-fest, takes less time to play, and encourages aggressive play, which leads to more conflict and a more interesting game as a result.