RoccoCon Wrap Up

RoccoCon 3: Neo-Takoma is about to E-X-P-L-O-D-E

For the third year, a bunch of friends descended on Takoma Park, Maryland, a suburb of Washington D.C. for RoccoCon. My college roommate moved there a few years ago, so we meet up every summer for a long weekend of boardgames - always a blast! And yes, this year's shirt had the above motto for those Akira lovers out there. Thanks to Brandon for getting the shirts printed up!

For this year's RoccoCon, my wife and I decided to try flying instead of driving. Believe it or not it only cuts 33% of the travel time off, once you include getting to and from the airports, going through security and so forth. However, driving can be pretty annoying itself, so I think it was worth it overall. The big drawback was that it would be hard to bring a lot of games. I put four games into large sized ziplocs and put them into one backpack, leaving the boxes at home: Goa, Stone Age, Brass, and Automobile. Goa and Stone Age sadly went unplayed, but Shane did try to get Stone Age on the table. I've promised him a game of it soon. I've started to really like Stone Age a lot more, once I started to play it on BSW.

Here's a rundown of the games I personally played in:

Puerto Rico

This game is a little lost in the haze of the long weekend. I remember it had a stop-and-start feel because there were a lot of little interruptions as people were getting set up with breakfast and rooms. I can't even remember who won, which is very unlike me!

Brass

I actually played Brass twice over the weekend. In the first game, I think my explanation of the rules almost made Christian and Rocco lose their minds. It's always hard to know whether you should give basic strategy tips/concepts out when teaching a game like Brass that has enough going on with the rules. About 3/4ths of the way through the game, Rocco made the realization that level 1 tiles only score once, while level 2+ tiles score during both phases. This is definitely an important strategic consequence of the rules, but I'm never sure whether to keep talking or just get people playing. I won the first game pretty handily, and over the course of the weekend Rocco started to clamor for a rematch. We got that in on Sunday night, with Brandon taking Christian's place and my wife retaining the fourth spot. I definitely did a better job teaching the game to Brandon, and he's a computer/iPhone/iPad game designer, so he caught on pretty quickly. This game ended up being closer overall, and Rocco took me out. The score was something like 125-115-105-95. I never know whether it's worth teaching people games if they won't have a chance to play it again soon, even if I think the game is incredible!

Vegas Showdown

It seems like there is a game of Vegas Showdown every year at RoccoCon, and a game of it played at WBC by people I know there, and somehow I've never tried it before this. Vegas Showdown has a reputation as a light, solid auction game that is unlike the Ameritrash that is most of Hasbro's library. I would have to say it lived up to its billing. It has everything you want in a good auction game... a solid auction mechanic and different evaluations for items based on individual players' situations. The mechanic is reminiscent of Amun-Re, where you can bid on a selection of different items, and if you get overbid you can bid on another one, and the bidding ends once everyone is bidding on a different item. In Vegas Showdown, there are more items than players, and anything that wasn't bought has an automatic minimum bid drop for the next round. It definitely would take a few plays to get the hang of the scoring system and how that interacts with prices. You get VPs based on completing various parts of your casino (the items you buy are mostly rooms such as a slots room, a restaurant, etc.), having nicer parts of your casino near each other (the fancy places have special symbols near the corners that line up), connecting the two ends of your casino together, and so on. The game had a lot of depth for a pretty short play time, and I'd love to play it again soon.

Battlestar Galactica

Another game I had somehow avoided playing thus far, and I was pretty excited to finally have a chance to try it. This is definitely enhanced by the fact that I'm in the midst of season four of the show. Why didn't my friends who had seen this MAKE me watch it? I'll never know. I'm pretty sure it's going to go down as my second favorite TV series after LOST.
I'm still not sure how I feel about the whole cooperative game genre, with the exclusion of D&D, my eternal love. (I've been playing D&D on and off since second grade, which probably explains my feelings about it!) I think the game can't be purely cooperative because then it's just a shared puzzle to solve... which I guess can be fine if you think of it that way. However, these games seem to shine if they have some kind of twist. The most common twist is the traitor mechanic, although it's worth pointing out another game that has a great twist, Space Alert, where the key idea is that it is real-time, and each player has secret cards, so you need to really communicate as a team.

I was happy to be President Roslyn for this game, and I was "Not a Cylon". We figured out pretty quickly that Mark was one, so he revealed himself before we were able to deal with him in any other way. Rocco was the head of deduction on that one, and it turns out that he too was a Cylon, and thought it would be a good idea to frame another player - it just turned out that he was framing one of his own! Unfortunately, with their machinations, the humans had made too little progress, and we were rendered extinct by our toaster betters.

I have to admit the game was much better than I expected it to be. A number of the players had played before, so the game play was pretty smooth. The accusations and deduction was interesting and fun, although I can imagine that depending on the group. The voting mechanic works well to provide some evidence of who the Cylon(s) might be - for a number of game effects, each player submits as many cards as they want, and two cards are taken at random from a "destiny deck", so you don't have perfect information. Rocco agreed with my assessment about finding the game more fun than he thought it would be, and he hasn't even watched the show yet. I hope he watches it over the course of this year and we can play again at RoccoCon 2012!

Automobile

I really like this game, but I'm never sure whether other people will like it. I managed to convince the group to get a five-player game of this going. I explained the rules and then went through an entire first turn myself, so everyone could get a sense of the goal and flow of the game, which I think really helped, although it took quite a while. After getting crushed by loss cubes the last time I played, I was a lot more careful this time, and I think I ended up taking Chrysler twice (you discard half your loss cubes rounded up). Brandon played excellently and took it down. I think I was in second or third at the end. I mostly focused on fancy and economy cars, using the parts factory to pump out cheap economy cars while using salesmen to get high profits from the fancy cars. This game isn't going to crack my top 10 all time list, but there is plenty to explore and think about. I'm looking forward to playing it a few times at the WBC in August.

1870

The 18xx games are unfortunate for me, because I really like them but don't play them often enough to really ever understand them. I've played a game of 1870 all three years of RoccoCon, so maybe it's time I bought a copy of this game, as well as the upcoming reprint of 1830. I think I'm at least understanding the basics of 1870 at this point. Two years ago, I think I came in second through sheer luck, because I somehow avoided getting screwed, while the others all were somehow messing with each other. Last year was more of what I expected, and I think I came in last or next-to-last. Going into this game, I had two goals: avoid GMO, which I think I had last year and wasn't all that happy with, and avoid any risky play. During the purchase of small companies, someone mentioned that the Missouri-Kansas-Texas company had a high rate of return, and it came with a free stock, so I set my eyes on that one. I realized pretty quickly that it wouldn't be feasible to start the Katy railroad company the stock is for, so I decided to be a diverse investor who would ditch stocks if I saw an opportunity to invest in a better company. This worked out pretty well as a number of companies I had stock in ended up pretty high on the stock chart. After a few rounds I founded Katy and was able to utilize some infrastructure already built up by Frisco, but they had pre-emptively blocked the stations. I got to work on my track building skills, but Brandon creatively blocked my first attempt to get past the stoppage. I was able to get Katy's destination run in before the end of the game, but it wasn't enough for me to overtake Rocco, so I came in second. The money values were closer than I think we have ever had in this game, and I think it's taking us less time each year to play. A great, fun tradition!

Castle Ravenloft

During our 1870 game, we took a break during which some of us decided to break out Castle Ravenloft, which I had never played. I've been nervous about this game, since I love D&D and was afraid this would disappoint. Overall, it was fun but not amazing. I could definitely see how a few house rules could make a big difference. It just seems weird that you can move up to the edge of a tile and not know what is five feet in front of your face, then all of a sudden you see an entire room with a monster in it. I guess I would prefer something that was just a little bit more realistic or more like regular D&D. I did really like the components and concept of the game. We won the scenario we played, which involved leading a fledgling vampire to a magical pool and dunking him in long enough to reverse his vampirism.

Merkator

Of course after having played Agricola and Le Havre a large number of times, and At the Gates of Loyang once, I have been very curious to try Merkator, especially since I heard it was a faster playing game that Uwe Rosenberg's others. On Sunday, we walked over to a cute little toy and game store that is only a few blocks away, and I found a copy of Merkator on the outside 30%-off table! I bought it for Rocco as a gift for his fine hospitality, and I walked through the rules with a few people later that day. Monday morning, before Rocco had to go to work and we had to head to the airport, I played a three player game with Rocco and Bronwen.

There is definitely some fun stuff happening in this game, which is basically a collect resources and trade them in game. One nice idea is that you can trade things in on another player's turn by giving them "time tokens". You can get time tokens by traveling to certain locations, while others cost time tokens. From what I could tell, the more lucrative contracts tend to be associated with the locations that cost a lot of time to get to. In our game, no one was really in danger of running out of time tokens. In addition to the points you get from completing contracts and getting more prestigious ones, you can also buy victory point "building cards". A few of these are related to how many time tokens you have. The one thing I am curious about in this game is how far you can really plan ahead. Should you be looking at the contracts that are coming up and use that information somehow? (They are in face-up piles.) I would definitely play this a few more times.

Wrap Up

Once again, RoccoCon delivered: great friends, great games, great times. I look forward to next year and more Battlestar Galactica and 1870, and perhaps getting Imperial on the table. A lot of my friends love Through the Ages, but I soured on it quickly and am thinking I should probably give it another chance. The RoccoCon crew might really enjoy that game, especially Shane - who brought the new Civilization game. I'm not sure what the rest of the crew thought of that one, but I did hear discussion of rules afterwards. At the game store I bought Merkator at, Rocco picked up Age of Steam, so I look forward to playing that one with him next year as well.

Chris

General Gaming Update

I wrote this post before the one before it, but forgot to post it:

Here's a general update of some gaming I've done recently.

I played a very fast-paced game of Puerto Rico with 3 of the seniors at the school. It's amazing how fast you can get this game done in when all the players know the rules and play pretty swiftly. Somehow I always get shoehorned into being a builder in Puerto Rico... I thought I was in really good shape in this game, and didn't put a lot of thought into who had how many points. I got a somewhat early factory but didn't have a lot of goods production, so it worked out moderately well. I was the first person to produce and sell coffee as well. I got a Harbor not too long after all of that, but somehow it didn't really get me all that much. I ended up getting both Guild Hall and City Hall, and manned them both, but Ben on my right had 26 points in VP chips! I think the final score was something like 52-46-36-34, with me in second.

I've played Imperial a few more times online. I'm at the point that I need to play face-to-face a couple of times so I can process what's going on a bit more. In my most recent game, I got truly trounced, as I had control of Austria while Russia ran away with it. I never really even thought about attacking Russia, but that was probably what I needed to do. I was too focused on trying to think about what to invest in.

Chris

General Gaming Update

I just thought I would give a general update of the games I've been playing lately, and some thoughts about them:

Imperial: I've played this a few more times, most recently in real life yesterday after a couple of games online. I won the game yesterday with scores that were about 147-146-144-133, but unlike a lot of other games, I have no idea how I won or what lead me to win. This is a pretty strange sensation!

Caylus: I played a game online, and there's definitely one thing I either haven't figured out yet or I don't like about Caylus. It seems that whoever gets out the first stone production building almost always wins, and even more so if they get out two of the three. This makes the last 2/3rds of the game seem somewhat pointless. Is there a way to fight back once that happens?

Brass: Either I'm finally getting a little bit better at Brass, or I am finally getting a little bit of luck at it. I've won two games out of my last four completed games online. I am having much more success by starting with coal and iron, while developing and putting out ports. In one of my wins I finally found the time and money to develop and play shipyards, which is something I definitely needed to try out.

Fighting Formations: I've played the first five scenarios - the learning scenario 0, and scenarios 1 through 4. Scenario 2 is a mini-monster, and we didn't quite finish it, but we had a general sense of who was winning. Overall I really like the game, but not nearly as much as Combat Commander. I'll probably write a review for this at some point.

Puerto Rico: I played a game of this online with some of the expansion buildings and got crushed because I decided to fool around and built a Church earlier than I should have, while the other players colluded on craftsman-captain.

I really want to play more Automobile and Age of Steam in the next month or so, and I hope to finally get in a game or three of Napoleon's Triumph...

Chris

Power Grid Session

Power Grid
5 player - France

Turn 1: I get the 3 plant for cost, no one else buys any oil this turn, which is nice. I build down in the south first in Montpelier to try to avoid a lot of building  conflict. The brown region in the north means Paris is on the edge of the map for this game. The person with the 10 plant builds to my right, meaning I have to go westward.

Turn 2: The 11 is put up for auction right away, and nuclear costs 3 at this point. When it get bid past 18, I get out of there, and it ends up going for 21. After that my plan is to pass a lot and see how good the plants get. I get good luck and the 21 plant pops! That's the power of taking the 3 or 4 plant and getting to go late in the turn 2 auction. I build westward in Carcassone and dream of meeples.

Turn 3: I move up to third in turn order, because two people built up to three cities. The 23 nuclear plant starts first. I bid it up once, but let someone get it for 25. The 25 comes up next. Even though I have a great plant, do I bid these up and try to get strong plants early at the cost of expanding? The 26 is on deck and might come up. I think it's probably better to build two cities and power 4 this turn than to buy a plant, and hope to get a good plant on turn 4. I have 42 electros at this point, so if I bought a plant, I'm probably not expanding. I build in Toulouse and Perpignan, making a great profit since my two oils cost 3 electro.

Turn 4: After the person in first passes, I put up the 19 trash plant and get it for the 19. It's not an endgame plant, but it expands my capacity to 8 from 5 and trash is in the 4 box and I'm the only one with trash. Since I only have 42 electros, I am only building out one more city this turn (the next extensions are 10 links) so I buy 4 oil and use the 3 plant one last turn, so my trash costs will decrease in the future. I put the house in Lourdes.

Turn 5: I'm in third for this round, which should be ok. The 20 plant is in the market still, but red starts with the 28. I pass on it, wanting at least a 5 capacity plant, and hopefully a 6. The 29 comes up, so the 32 stays on deck. Yellow passes out so I have to put the 20 up for sale. (Coal costs 2 at this point.) Amazingly, neither of the next two players buys the 32 plant! I just buy two coal and two trash and don't plan on firing the 20 yet, so I can build in Bordeaux and Biarritz. I never know whether it's wise to trigger step 2 or not, I just do it if I think it fits the rest of my plan. At this point I have a sneaking suspicion that red is going to run away with it - they have the 18 and 27 wind plants, and all of Paris by themselves. They did have to pay 18 to get out of being boxed in.

Turn 6: The 32 goes right up for grabs, and I expect it to be pricey. I give it up for 44 electros... very tough call. It would have put my cap to 15. I end up having to pass when the best plant is the 29. I am about to build three cities eastward to overlap with yellow and fire the 20 and 21, when I realize it's better to build up to Limoges and Clermont-Ferrand, giving me access to the yellow area of the map, since no one else will get to the southeast corner anyway, so I can take that later. An example of a subtle but important decision that many people might overlook in this position. (I also built Nimes in the southeast.) Whoops, I didn't realize that put me to 10, so I end up firing the trash plant for a tiny profit.

Turn 7: I'm in third and the 31 is on the market and put up right away. This time I'm fighting for it! I end up bidding with the guy who got the 32, which is annoying, but he lets me have it for 52. I think my plants should all be set now, 20-21-31 for 15 capacity, and I can just build to that by next turn probably. Pretty fast game, if it works out that way. The 30 trash plant comes out and gets bid up to 50. No one else has 15 capacity at this point. It probably is going to come down to how crazy the auctions get - if someone can get a good plant cheap they might be able to have a chance. I just build one in Saint-Etienne. Red builds down to try to block me perhaps, but I will build before him next turn since he has 13 cities and I have 11.

Turn 8: Red proclaims he could have won by building out to 15 the previous turn, but he missed it. I'm not sure there was anything I could have done to stop that.I build my last four cities and win the game. Red builds a ton of cities just to show off that he really had the cash. :)

Overall, an interesting and solid game. The resources were used up pretty evenly, so they were all cheap the whole game. I'm slowly gaining an appreciation for and hopefully skill in the building aspect of the game - how to avoid getting blocked off while not giving up too much in terms of cheap connections. I'm pretty good at the auctions part of the game, but there is still a lot to figure out there too! France continues to be a map I enjoy. I wish the online version had some of the newer maps though...

Side note: There is an underrated aspect to playing online - you have to learn how to play being different colors! I was grey for the first time ever this game, and it threw me a bit.

Chris

The Rondel Games

I've now played three of Mac Gerdt's Rondel games, and I wanted to talk about my impressions and thoughts about them. I have played Antike, Imperial, and Navegador. I will probably give Hamburgum (the second one in the series) a try at some point, since my friend Andy (yet another Andy different from any mentioned in previous posts) has a copy and wants to play it more. I'll talk about them in their chronological order of publication. I don't personally own any of them, but I am considering purchasing two of them, as you will soon find out.

Overall

For those of you who haven't played any of these games, the rondel is a mechanism for selection of actions that limits your choices each turn. Typically the actions you can perform are short and sweet, so all of these games have a nice flow to them, which is a big plus. The basic idea is that there are 8 spaces in a circular track, and you have a pawn that travels clockwise along the track. You can move your pawn one to three spaces, then do the action there. The games generally provide some mechanism for paying a cost to move further if you would like to, which generally happens in the end game. The big differences in the games are the themes (civilization, war profiteering, or navigating/market manipulation). It's also of note that there is zero luck in any of these games! Here are the three rondels to give you the idea.

Antike
I played this one last year at our now annual tradition of traveling down to D.C. to my college roommate's place for a long weekend of games. The rondel is applied to building civilizations in this game, and you build up fortifications, armies, technology and leaders through the actions on the rondel. This was the first game that I have won my first play of and then didn't want to play it again! Despite the elegance of the rondel, there was something lacking. I was able to build up a few temples, get a VP lead, and turtle my way to victory. Maybe there is more there, but I am not seeing it - so I'd rather play another rondel game instead.

Imperial
I bought this game for a friend, and we've only had the chance to play it twice. The nature of winning in Imperial is very counter-intuitive, so it didn't blow me away at first, but I'm sure that is just me needing more plays. I'm really looking forward to giving it more of a chance. The main notion in Imperial is that you can buy stocks in countries during World War I - England, France, Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy; and the pawns on the rondel belong to the countries rather than the players! Whoever has the most stock in a country gets to manage that countries turn, which could including building factories, building units (armies or fleets), moving their units, or collecting taxes. The interesting and strange thing about this game is that despite its wargame trappings such as an area map with units who fight it out, you don't really care about conquering territory or winning wars all of the time. Sometimes you just want to have two countries you are investing in fight so that you can collect more profits. I definitely need to play this again soon, especially since it exists on BSW. It's also worth mentioning that they have released a sequel game called Imperial 2030, which features a map of the entire world.

Navegador
I played this twice at TotalConfusion, an annual gaming convention that's not too far from here and whose gaming room is run by some friends of mine. I highly recommend the convention for anyone who lives in the New England region. I finally played this again yesterday, and really enjoyed it. Unlike Antike, I won this game and felt like it was a worthwhile victory. I was able to find a strategy niche that avoided what other players were doing, and made it pay off. In Navegador, the board is a map of sea zones that lead in a pretty linear fashion from Portugal to Nagasaki. The rondel options include building ships and hiring workers, buying buildings (two of which can let you buy ships or workers more efficiently), sailing your ships, and selling a worker for a victory point multiplier. The rules to this game are incredibly elegant, and I like how there are a variety of seemingly legitimate strategies. When you sail two ships into an unexplored zone, you reveal some colonies that can be later acquired through one of the other rondel spaces (Colony), and you receive an exploration token. There is also a market for the three types of goods that a colony may provide - sugar, gold, and coffee. One of the really interesting aspects is that the market can be pushed in either direction by the players. When you go to the Market space on the rondel, you can choose for each good whether to sell (based on how many colonies of that type you have) or to process (based on how many factories you have of that type - which are the other buildings you can buy in the Building action). The processing has a different payout that the selling. The victory point multipliers you can buy are based on number of: colonies, factories, exploration tokens, cathedrals (the worker building), and shipyards (the ship building). The game ends when all of the buildings are built, or someone gets to Nagasaki. This game feels like a 9 to me - at this point, I can't imagine saying no to it when someone proposed it to play, but I wouldn't choose it 100% of the time. The playtime also seems to be a bit shorter than Imperial, but you get a very satisfying experience for the time invested. I'm very impressed and would strongly consider buying it.

Summary
The rondel games are getting better and better, as Mac Gerdts is seeming to become a stronger game designer. Imperial currently sits at 33 on BoardGameGeek, and Navegador is at 77. Antike is at 198 and Hamburgum is at 248. Apparently the theme of Hamburgum is city building and sounds like a more typical euro than Imperial or Navegador, so I might like that as well. These games all seem to be worth at least trying out to see if you like them.

Chris

Stone Age Session

We got to play a game of Stone Age with two friends yesterday, Jasper and Alanna. Jasper has incredible intuition with games, even when his five year old daughter is distracting him, and he lost to my wife by a few points. Stone Age is definitely more of a game (i.e, there is more skill) than I thought, an opinion I've come to through my inability to win it. I had recently finally won a game online, which was nice, but I'm still awful at Stone Age. I actually don't find the dice feel like a huge factor to me in the outcome of the game, although a bad early food roll might be the biggest potential impact dice roll. Here's how the game started out:

Turn 1: Alanna takes a baby, Bronwen takes farm, I take tool.
Turn 2: Bronwen takes farm, I take baby.
Turn 3: I take farm.

Is this a mistake? Should I go to a starvation strategy right there and pass up the farm and instead take another baby? One thing I had wondered was whether the people in the first two seats have an advantage, but in this game Jasper did well from the fourth seat.

I got a few cards early - the 3 x hut card, a 2 x hut card, and a 2 x farm, but then had a hard time getting any more farms - so on turn 7 I decided to forgo the farm and start starving my people. I was having a hard time keeping up with food requirements, which seems to be difficult for me when I am in seats 3/4. It's possible that my strategy/style in this game has swung from overvaluing the cards to undervaluing them and rating huts too strongly. Overall, I really like Stone Age. I would play it at WBC but unfortunately it usually conflicts with other games that I like.

Chris

Brass Strategy Question 1

I'm working on learning how to play Brass well by playing regularly online, and a great way to learn is to thoroughly analyze situations with other players - so please comment on this post and discuss!

The situation deals with being the fourth player on turn 1. The first three players developed on turn 1, leaving iron costing $4. My hand did not allow for building a coal mine, so I built a level 1 cotton mill in Colne. During turn 2, one of the players developed two more ports, putting iron up to $5, another built a level 2 port and took a loan, and the third built a cotton mill next to the port and flipped it. It's now my turn to end turn 2, and if I spend less than $7, I will get a double turn. What do you do?

My hand is: Blackburn, Lancaster, Liverpool, Macclesfield, Preston, Stockport, Shipyard, Burnley.

One possibility is to built the canal and flip my cotton mill. Another is to build a coal mine in Burnley and take a loan, then build an iron works in Blackburn - but is that too many level 1 tiles? I could also build a second mill, this time in Macclesfield, and try to flip both of the mills in one action later on. Would you ever develop for $10?

Chris