Bank holiday gaming

RikTheChief wrote:It's a bank holiday weekend! I will be free Monday 28th if anyone wants to meet up.

RikTheChief wrote:Cool we can meet at the Red Deer I will be there about 1pm. Any preference on what you want to play?

Samuel_C wrote:

RikTheChief wrote:Cool we can meet at the Red Deer I will be there about 1pm. Any preference on what you want to play?

I've got no preference really. I noticed you were asking about Century Spice Road though, will happily bring that.

AshC wrote:I'm down for coming tomorrow

SamVS wrote:Anyone got urges for something specific? I was looking though your libraries and keep getting my eyes caught on two player games. Hive and Battle Line and the Final Fantasy Trading Card Game, for instance. Have you played your copy of A Game of Thrones: The Card Game, Jen? I've been wanting to try that one for years. Which version is it (the original CCG, Second Edition, or the HBO one)? Don't know if it will be convenient to split off for two player games, though. Depends who's there and when.

Would quite like a game of Agricola, or something else buildy. Also, we definitely have to play Jane Austen's Matchmaker, Tom.

SamVS wrote:Anyone got urges for something specific? I was looking though your libraries and keep getting my eyes caught on two player games. Hive and Battle Line and the Final Fantasy Trading Card Game, for instance. Have you played your copy of A Game of Thrones: The Card Game, Jen? I've been wanting to try that one for years. Which version is it (the original CCG, Second Edition, or the HBO one)? Don't know if it will be convenient to split off for two player games, though. Depends who's there and when.

Would quite like a game of Agricola, or something else buildy. Also, we definitely have to play Jane Austen's Matchmaker, Tom.

Martin G wrote:The first game passed quickly and quite pleasantly. The rules are very clear and we had no questions for the demonstrators. I liked that each player gets a choice of two characters at the beginning, which confer a special power. But alarm bells started to ring when the final tally had all five of us distributed within a range of something like 73 - 80 points.

The second and third games confirmed my suspicions. The way the game works practically forces a tight outcome, in which the winner will often be determined more by luck than judgment. The different scoring types are so well balanced that each space you visit will allow you to accumulate a similar number of points, usually 2 or 3. In the most absurd case, the ‘hot springs’ spaces let you draw the top card from a deck that contains only two types of cards: 2VP and 3VP. Our group at the hotel took to making an ironic drum-roll before this thrilling revelation. But given the tight margins we saw, drawing a couple of 2s instead of 3s could easily lose you the game!

The real problem is that there is no location valuable enough to justify jumping several spaces ahead on the road. If you do that, the other players simply crawl along hoovering up the points behind you while you wait for them to catch up. Glen More (though I don’t like it much) avoids this problem by having some very powerful tiles that are worth jumping ahead for, and by penalising players at the end of the game for having too many tiles. Tokaido does the exact opposite; the bonuses at the end make it even more important to visit as many spaces as possible along the way.

The net effect of all this is that there are very few meaningful choices. You almost always want to work your way along the road in micro-steps, jumping no more than one or two spaces ahead for something a little more suited to your current situation. Come the end of the game, the effect of a couple of good or bad draws from the random decks will most likely more than span the range between first and last.

Maybe this is what was meant by a ‘Zen’ game: one in which decisions don’t really matter and the journey is more important than the destination. But once you get beyond the glowing white sheen, Tokaido offers precious little in the way of tension or excitement. There’s nothing here for gamers and as a gateway I could easily suggest a hundred more interesting options.

If it had been presented in shades of brown and themed around a medieval pilgrimage, I very much doubt that it would have been a sell-out Essen success story.
[This was a much better last line than my original one. In retrospect I didn't like the hint of gamer elitism - I love family games, this just isn't a good one.]

Dr. UDO wrote:My wife likes Jane Austen. I mean really likes Jane Austen. She owns multiple copies of her books and reads them. She owns all the easily obtainable movie productions and likes to watch them for date night. We have even watched the FIVE HOUR BBC production of Pride and Prejudice multiple times. She has had me read all the books so that I could talk about the characters with her (I rated Pride and Prejudice 3 stars on Goodreads.com and got in trouble, but that is a different story). I indulge her since she also indulges my gaming habit.

Dr. UDO wrote:I was pleasantly surprised that there was more game here than I thought there would be. There are some fun momemnt when you realize you can pressure someone into a bad trade with your "scum ball" gentlemen (my sister-in-law's words) or force someone to discard to avoid a bad marriage. The best part of this game is playing it with a fan of the novels though. This results in comments like:

"They gave Lydia a virtue of two? How did that happen?"
"Augusta Hawkins is listed as wealth of four and Anne Elliot is listed as wealth of two. They both had a dowry of 10,000 pounds! How is this different?"
"Mr. Collins should have at least some virtue!"
"The distribution of these cards are wrong. Mr. Darcy had 10,000 pounds a year!"
"Oh look! I can make Elizabeth marry Darcy! That is the way it is supposed to happen!"

It might also result in internet research to verify the validity of their distributions finding scholorly works like http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/printed/number12/heldman.htm

SamVS wrote:Thanks for bringing all the games I mentioned, everyone

Agricola was great. We should play it more often. First off, there's a toy-like quality to your farm that other building games don't seem to have. It's fun just to buy a handful of fences posts and arrange them in your farm, and to take the livestock and put them in the fenced areas, or to flip the tiles to upgrade your houses. It's better than just sliding tiles next to each other. That's really nice. But then to balance out all the looking at and fiddling with your own board you'll be doing, the worker placement aspect is rather unforgiving, forcing you all to pay a lot of attention to the shared board, and also to other people's farms and resources, so you can't spend too much time in your own world. Overall, pretty delightful to play.

I kind of loved Jane Austen's Matchmaker, too. Maybe I just found how the theme fed into the rules so funny it distracted me from the game, but the game itself also seemed pretty smartly designed and balanced.

Samuel, Tom and Ashley played the worst game of Codenames I have ever seen. Such a fine comedy of errors it's a wonder they weren't doing it on purpose for laughs. Very funny game.

Base game Tokaido was a little dull, though I was happy to find this rather good review that mirrored my feelings:

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/874185/zen-and-art-victory-point-maintenance

Martin G wrote:The first game passed quickly and quite pleasantly. The rules are very clear and we had no questions for the demonstrators. I liked that each player gets a choice of two characters at the beginning, which confer a special power. But alarm bells started to ring when the final tally had all five of us distributed within a range of something like 73 - 80 points.

The second and third games confirmed my suspicions. The way the game works practically forces a tight outcome, in which the winner will often be determined more by luck than judgment. The different scoring types are so well balanced that each space you visit will allow you to accumulate a similar number of points, usually 2 or 3. In the most absurd case, the ‘hot springs’ spaces let you draw the top card from a deck that contains only two types of cards: 2VP and 3VP. Our group at the hotel took to making an ironic drum-roll before this thrilling revelation. But given the tight margins we saw, drawing a couple of 2s instead of 3s could easily lose you the game!

The real problem is that there is no location valuable enough to justify jumping several spaces ahead on the road. If you do that, the other players simply crawl along hoovering up the points behind you while you wait for them to catch up. Glen More (though I don’t like it much) avoids this problem by having some very powerful tiles that are worth jumping ahead for, and by penalising players at the end of the game for having too many tiles. Tokaido does the exact opposite; the bonuses at the end make it even more important to visit as many spaces as possible along the way.

The net effect of all this is that there are very few meaningful choices. You almost always want to work your way along the road in micro-steps, jumping no more than one or two spaces ahead for something a little more suited to your current situation. Come the end of the game, the effect of a couple of good or bad draws from the random decks will most likely more than span the range between first and last.

Maybe this is what was meant by a ‘Zen’ game: one in which decisions don’t really matter and the journey is more important than the destination. But once you get beyond the glowing white sheen, Tokaido offers precious little in the way of tension or excitement. There’s nothing here for gamers and as a gateway I could easily suggest a hundred more interesting options.

If it had been presented in shades of brown and themed around a medieval pilgrimage, I very much doubt that it would have been a sell-out Essen success story.
[This was a much better last line than my original one. In retrospect I didn't like the hint of gamer elitism - I love family games, this just isn't a good one.]