Shogun

It has been a while since I played Shogun, so last week a game was organized and our samurai troops shuffled around feudal Japan. It was a great game that ended in a 4 player draw with the winner decided on the number of war chests. As I had calculated to spend all my chests I ended up last but it was a monumental game.

Shogun is one of my favorite games, its more than an area control game with players having limited number of actions to perform and the cube tower is a great piece of kit.

For those that don't know about Shogun I will break it down. The board is made up of Japan's provinces with players having a number of cubes in the provinces they control. Everything starts off even with each player controlling the same number of provinces and having the same number of cubes. You have a card for each province that you control.

The game is broken down into 2 years, with each year having three playable seasons followed by the winter season where scoring and other processes happen.

For each of the three main seasons players have to decide what their province is going to do. Each player has a board showing all 10 options and they must place a province card upside down onto the action they want. The actions are broken down into 3 building actions, castle, temple and theatre. Obtaining Rice which is used to feed your provinces in Winter and war chests which are the currency of the game. The other actions revolve around building up your troop types and moving them around the board attacking adjacent provinces.

Once all of the players have chosen a province then the order of these actions is revealed and a turn order bid happens. One of the nice mechanics is that only the first 5 of these 10 possible actions is viewable at the start of the round. As the actions happen, the remaining actions are flipped. Sometimes this means that you may not be able to afford to build your armies as the war chest action hasn't happened yet. Either way you only get to do 3 possible actions in a province before winter happens.

Taking rice or war chests from a province makes the local peasants unhappy and revolt markers are placed in the region. These have two effects, one the farmers will not help the defenders in battle and two, if you have more than one token in a province the peasants will revolt against the occupying player.

Combat is handled with the cube tower. It's one of the best parts of the game. It's a cardboard tower that you drop in the attacking and defending cubes. They rattle around inside and a number of cubes will end up in the tray at the bottom. These are then used to determine who wins and the attrition of the battle. Sometimes your cubes will end up in the tower to come out at a later time. It works really well, especially as you seed the tower at the start of the game.

When Winter arrives players must have enough rice to feed all of their provinces. If not then more revolt markers are placed on the board and players can loose the provinces if the peasants revolt and win. Scoring then starts with players earning points for the number of provinces they own, the number of buildings they control and for the majority control of each building type per region.

After the first year has ended, all revolt markers are removed and the whole process starts again.

Its a fine balance between attacking for more provinces, defending provinces that you have built on and building to gain the majority in each region.

Most of the game is spent planning, which can lead to a bit of analysis paralysis. It also takes a bit of time to setup, the names of the provinces take a while to find on the board but after the first year new players should have a good idea of what they are doing and how to win. Subsequent plays help round the strategies of the game out.

Overall I really like this game and wish I could play it more often. It's a big game so it takes a bit of thought and table space but this shouldn't put people off.

Viva le France!

It's all been about the French recently. A two week holiday to the South of France meant for little gaming. Apart from a couple of hands of Franks Zoo and Colloretto there wasn't much gaming going on.

I did however manage to visit Carcassonne, inspiration for one of the first games I bought in my resurgence into the hobby. It's an amazing place and well worth a visit if you enjoy wandering around castles. However be warned, anything game related costs a fortune. I had the idea of buying an expansion for Carcassonne while I was visiting, it seemed to make sense buying Traders and Builders while wandering around the historic courtyards. However the prices soon put me off. In the castle gift shop the base game was selling for 38 Euros. Yep £31 at today's exchange rate. That would buy me two copies here from my favorite online supplier. The expansions didn't do much better. I decided to wait till I got back home to spend any money on game related items.

I had arranged for two nights of gaming when I got back. The first brought Glory to Rome and Macao to the table. I really like Macao, it has everything. Tiles, Cubes, Dice and Cards that all work very well. Yet again Hannah won the game continuing her winning streak. I messed up early on in the game picking up cards I couldn't build. Next time I will think hard about this.
Glory to Rome was good, it took a little while to get going as it was new to me and the others had only played it once. I was so close to winning but didn't quite manage it. If I had one more go I would have been the new Emperor. I really enjoyed this game and will be looking for a copy when the reprint hit the shelves later this month.

Tuesday night put me back in my French mood as I took the rains of my French army on the lookout for water slides and Ziggy Piggies. Waterloo had been picked up at the recent UK Games Expo by Rich and it was the first time it had hit the table. Luckily Rich had setup the game ready, although a few pieces were missing you get a lot of chunky wooden bits in the box.
I managed to win the game by continually harassing the English troops and managed a win by 3PM just as the Prussians arrived for tea. Overall a good game that felt a little restrictive at the start. My troops seemed hemmed in by the sheer number of other pieces and an annoying ridge line in the center of the board.
Next time I will play the role of the British and see if I can put history back on track.

Spiel des Jahres

The nominations for this years Spiel des Jahres has been released.

Dixit Official Site | BGG

Identik (Portrayal) Official Site | BGG

Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age Official Site | BGG

a la Carte Official Site | BGG

Fresco Official Site | BGG

Out of all the games I think Dixit will win. It's a very good game that would suit families. It's not too complex and looks very nice. Roll through the Ages is a good game and one I enjoy playing and Fresco looks like a nice euro game but I am not sure if there is anything that new in its mechanics.

So, Dixit gets my vote.

Dungeon Lords

It's been a busy week of gaming with two meets. The first we played a couple of fillers No Thanks and Franks Zoo followed by Power Grid.
It was a close game with all of us rushing to build 17 cities, We all managed it but only Dobbie could power then and scored the win. I think it was the closest Power Grid game I have played.

Later in the week we had a P.O.B. meet and I finally managed to give Dungeon Lords a go. It turned out to be a pretty clever but unforgiving worker placement game. I enjoyed teh game but played it very badly ending up loosing all my dungeon in the first year. I was then on teh back foot and managed a final score of -2. Not the best. A few early mistakes seaaled teh deal, I was just too evil and the Paladin decided that my dungeon was in most need of being cleansed. I think he must have had a bottle of Cilit Bang with him as it was sparkly white when he was finished.

Its a very good game and now on my wish/want list. I want to give to another play, just so I can beat my negative score.

The rest of the evening was filled with filler games, No Thanks, Franks Zoo and Pack'n'Stack.

Automobile

We had a mini game session on Friday night and Ed chose Automobile as the main game of the evening. If anyone knows Ed he likes his economic games and Automobile was a pretty good one. I have mixed reviews of Martin Wallace games, I appreciate the technical aspex of the game but I find them a little hard to get my head around. Brass lived on my shelf for ages till I managed to get it to the table. Perikles is still there.

Automobile is all about building car factories, recuiting sales people and producing cars and selling them. Its a balancing act of building as much as you think you can sell, with unsold cars loosing you money. I was suprised it only plays for 4 turns, and the game lasted about 2 hours. I suspected it to last a little bit longer.

I won the game, not sure how I managed it but I went for a high end approach, building as many high end cars as I could and making sure they were all sold. Mid range cars bulked up the rest of my production. It seemed to work as I had only a few loss cubes, mainly for having sales guys twiddling there thumbs.
I will be happy to play it again, now I know what to do its definately going to make a difference. Also I thing the next play may be a little bit more aggressive, we were all playing fairly and not trying to under cut each other.

We had a little more time after Automobile so I pulled out Dominion Seaside as the others haven't seen or played with the cards. It was a good game but I just couldn't get my money engine running. We managed to end the game with all the points cards being bought up. The last province card ended the game, never seen that before.
I had enough cards to beef up my hand each round but no where near enough money in it to actually buy anything. Lesson learnt.

The house now has an Ipod Touch so I need to spend some time on teh app store looking for those board game conversions. The only problem I can see is wrestling the thing out of my sons hands. I may have to add another one to a virtual basket sometime soon.

New Games

I haven't bought as many new games recently. Mainly because I have been trying to hold back and the other is I have been buying a few games on the Xbox. Most months its either one or the other.

Well today I have ordered up a few games.

Macao
No Thanks
Franks Zoo
Are you the Traitor?
Cthulhu Dice

Originally I was looking for a couple of card games to take on holiday. I always envision playing a few games while sitting in the sun but it doesn't always happen. My kids are happy to play but its difficult finding games that are portable and playable for them. Last year Uno and Colloretto were both played heavily, Uno I can take or leave while I do enjoy coloretto.
I am hoping that Franks Zoo and No Thanks will hit the spot, and I am tempted to take along Carc. Mainly as we will be 45 minutes away from the real place and a visit is going to happen.

After adding the light games in I tend to look for something for me, Macao was a good price and it sounds like a nice game. The Spiel guys talked about it a few eps back so it was added to the basket. The others were just fillers to bulk up the order.

Hopefully these will be delivered by Monday in time for some testing next week. I am also going to try and dig out a chess set so I can start teaching the kids how to play. Maybe I should start with Checkers!

Player Aids

One of the best resource on BoardGameGeek has to be the abundance of player aid's. As soon as pickup a new game I will always have a shift to look for any player aids that are going to help. Sometimes these player made files are invaluable, the recent player aid for Ghost Stories helped by putting all of the icons and symbols onto a single sheet. These were printed and laminated and have proved invaluable.

So why don't publishers put decent player aids in the box to start with? I recently played Twilight Struggle, one of my favorite games. The player aids that come with it are ok, but no exactly inspiring and certainly don't convey enough information. It was half way through the game before I remembered that coup's in battleground countries reduce the defcon level. Oops!

For me a player aid needs to have all the key points on a single sheet, with maybe a second sheet if cards or buildings need explaining or summarizing. The player aid should be colourful, with different areas marked out, not just a black and white sheet of paper.

Some publishers, you know who they are seem to have a thing about stopping player aids. I understand copyright, but if its something that's going to help get you game played and sold then surely there should be no issue in allowing players to create and share there work. Personally I think great player aids should be incorporated into reprints with the designer acknowledged.

Maybe next time my commrades should have one of these. http://www.boardgamegeek.com/filepage/46383/major-sholtos-coolest-ever-guide-to-cold-war-opera