Convention Report: The Gathering of Friends 2007: April 1, 2007

By W. Eric Martin
April 1, 2007

Alan Moon’s Gathering of Friends, a small convention that attracts doznes of game designers and publishers—not to mention gamers—takes place early each April and although a few tournaments and special events take place each year, most of the time is devoted to open gaming. New titles have arrived from the Nuremberg fair, designers and showing off prototypes, and publishers are previewing early release copies. Whether you want to play games that are obscure, brand new or designated classics, the Gathering is the place to find them.

What’s the hit of the show for 2007? To find out, all you have to do is keep watching the tables. Read the report below and see whether you can figure out my take on this week’s hot game.

Huang Di
Designer Bryan Johnson, who is now also marketing manager for Cambridge Games Factory—which is publishing Huang Di in May or June—was showing off his game to check for final tweaks before printing. Here’s what I first wrote about the games in January:

Players use role cards to manage wealth and workers in order to build sections of the Great Wall. As in Power Grid, resource management down to the last buck and builder is essential to good play, and you need to think at least one full turn ahead to figure out which moves will benefit you the most, while still leaving your options open. The first play was very much training for the second game, when I’ll actually have a clue of how to play well.

That second game was today, and I was indeed far better prepared for how to play. You have access to eight role cards each round, and you want to bring together combinations of workers (both peasant and conscripted) and building materials under the watchful eye of your taskmaster in order to build parts of the wall. The other players were all new to the game, so I was able to beat them. Hey, experience does count for something!

The graphic design is functional and typical of the clip-art style of other CGF titles. Final decisions on the artwork and packaging still aren’t complete.

Notre Dame
Alea’s newest title is out in Europe and should be hitting the US in early April. With at least a half-dozen copies of Stefan Feld’s newest title on hand, the game was being played on four or five tables throughout the day. For the quick summary of game play, let’s turn to Rick’s report from Spiel 2006:

The board of Notre Dame is made up of a number of city district boards which meet at the middle where the Notre Dame cathedral is placed.  Each player plays on his own city district, but you do have a piece that can wander to other player’s districts.  A player’s district is made up of eight spaces, each with a building. Each player has his own set of nine cards, each of which is an action that you can take on your turn. To begin, each player shuffles their own cards and draws three.  You then keep one and pass the other two to your left.  You get two cards from the player on your right and again you keep one and pass the other.  At this end of this you’ll have three cards, one of which is yours and two others from other players.  At this point the cards are all yours - who they came from makes no difference. Now each player in turn plays one card and does the card’s action.  This goes around twice.  After that you will discard your last card - it will not be used. Most actions consist of placing cubes (people) into the spaces (buildings) in your district.  Each building gives you something - victory points, money, the ability to get more people, protection against rats (more on that in a minute) and more.  One action allows you to move a pawn of yours around the board to pick up victory point chips. Once all the actions are done, there is a phase where players can pay to do a special action.  Then, it’s time for the rats!  Yes, every turn your district is going to be infested by a number of rats.  You can avoid them by placing your people in certain buildings or by using a special action, but if the rats get to be too much you get a plague which loses you people and victory points. Play continues for a set number of rounds.  At the end the victory points are totted up and whoever has the most wins. That’s a quick summation of the game - there’s a lot more to it than that.  I liked the game a lot - I thought it was very good.  For me, Notre Dame harkened back to the glory days of Alea when gamer games were their bread and butter and this is very much a gamer game.

Rick gives an excellent summary of game play, but actually learning what the cards all do does take some time as you remember which icon is which. Christen Hildenbrand taught me and fellow New Hampshire gamer Ray Dennis how to play—well, he taught us how to make the moves, then he taught us by example how to play, nearly doubling the second-place finisher’s score, thereby really showing us how to play.

Notre Dame feels like an Alea game through and through. If the box had no label, you’d still recognize the contributions of designer Stefan Brück. The graphic design is elegant, with polygonal player boards that fit together in different formations for two through five players. The game has multiple avenues for scoring, and although luck of the cards is present in which cards you receive form your neighbor, you know all the cards that you’re going to draw and can develop strategies towards your goal.

A common complaint floating around the room is that the game is largely multi-player solitaire because players place cubes only in their own areas. While that last statement is true, players do use a carriage to move around the other districts and steal messages, not to mention competing in Notre Dame itself for points. There’s also the central card-passing mechanism, which is nothing but interaction. A weak right-hand player might even excessively benefit the player to his left, but I think it’s far too early to denounce the game on those grounds. More later on Notre Dame in this report…

Farlander
BGN columnist Scott Tepper had this multi-player abstract on hand after ordering it from Estonia based on Bruno Faidutti’s recommendation on his website.

Farlander is a luck-free abstract strategy game for 2-4 players. The obard consists of seven roughly hexagonal tiles that are placed in a hexagon; each tile depicts three or four pieces of land, some with castles on them. Players start with a certain number of pieces, then take turns placing them on the board. You can place a piece in any empty region or a region that already contains your pieces. No region can hold more than five pieces.

Once all the pieces have been placed, players take turns attacking their neighbors to take over land. Attacking is simple: If a region contains fewer opponent pieces than the number of your pieces in adjacent regions, you can remove the opponent’s pieces. You must then move in at least one of your pieces into this area, and you can move in as many as five, as long as you leave at least one piece behind in each region.

Farlander is all about attrition—you want to take out large batches of your opponents’ pieces and reduce him to single units in his regions as quickly as possible because he then can’t counterattack. Once all players can no longer move, a player scores one point for each region he occupies and the high score wins. In the advanced game, the castles provide an extra region of defense in addition to doubling the points award for a region.

As a multi-player luck-free game, Farlander suffers from typical complaints such as a weaker player inadvertantly being able to throw the game. The gameboards are modular and allow for a fresh looking board on each play. Since game play is short and understanding long, modularity is great for this game.

After Farlander, six of us played a prototype about which nothing more will be said, other than that it was quite silly. More familiar games followed—familiar to me, at least: Ingenious, Escalation! (for which I offered a first impression on March 30), Thurn & Taxis, and Crokinole.

Notre Dame
After Adam Smiles and I made short work of BGN writers Ava Jarvis and Frank Branham on the Crokinole board, I looked around for another game, despite the late hour I found Anthony Rubbo preparing to teach Notre Dame to two others. I had enjoyed my first play quite a bit, so I asked to join, and discovered that the game played equally well with four players.

Immediately afterward Anthony asked about trying the two-player version, which uses the four player set-up, and we jumped into it, determined to finish in 30 minutes. We did, with me squeaking out a one point win. With only two players, you choose one of three cards, pick one of two cards from your opponent, then receive back a card of your own that the opponent rejected. Being able to judge what your opponent might reject, and thus return to you, can be tricky, but floating a card across the table and back can be huge in the right situation. Playing into Notre Dame itself is somewhat pointless in a two-player game since each player has the opportunity to do so, which is mostly a wash in terms of points. Still, we were pleased with how well the game worked.

Die Säulen von Venedig
This game from Goldsieber was an Essen 2006 release but still new to me. Strangely enough, the game requires players to play a card each turn, then pass that card to the left-hand neighbor, just like Notre Dame. Cards allow players to place pillars in the canal, purchase buildings, place buildings on pillars, and take a number of special actions.

With six players, the game seemed to pass incredibly quickly—but the game ends only when the supply of pillars is exhausted, and unless a player is in the lead, why would he or she want to end the game? We realized that the game could potentially last for hours or perhaps the remainder of the convention, but then I decided to chance taking pillars while in the lead. Other players scored before I could take a turn, and the victory slipped away. The endgame condition seems bizarre, but could perhaps work better with only two or three players since each player would go first more often.

Die Säulen was followed by Tichu—yet another game in which you pass cards to your neighbors—and after Tichu came, yes, two more games of Notre Dame! Anthony smoked me the first game, which ran only 30 minutes, then won again with a third player in the mix.  Over these five games, the winners used a variety of strategies on their way to victory, and no one strategy seems dominant. Each player has the same nine cards in his deck, but the order in which you draw them and the nature of the cards passed to you require tricky juggling.

Okay, the first definitive winner from Gathering 2007 is already apparent, but what else will be gamers be gabbing about in the weeks and months ahead? More on that in the next report…

Pictures - Click the picture for a larger version
	A polished prototype of Huang Di showing completed favor cards, role cards, and a section of the great wall itself.
	Notre Dame with three players
	Farlander, just after token placement and prior to the carnage
	Die Säulen von Venedig, with many pillars claimed and only a few open with ownership markers waiting to be transmuted into VPs
	A sigh-inducing opening hand in Tichu

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Comments:

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That’s such a sad Tichu hand! Posted by Kevin Wood on Apr 4, 2007 at 12:20 PM | #

I think I had that hand the last time I played Tichu! Thanks for the reviews. If Notre Dame weren’t already on my want list, it would be now. Here’s hoping that it actually arrives in April! Posted by David Reed on Apr 4, 2007 at 04:02 PM | #

Is that tichu hand before or after the pass? Either way, that is not a bad hand. What about the huge 6 card straight flush bomb? That’s friggin’ HUGE! Posted by Jasen Robillard on Apr 4, 2007 at 04:02 PM | #

Jasen, a bomb only wins one trick.  There’s still those 5 singletons and a pair of 8s to get rid of. Posted by Doug Orleans on Apr 4, 2007 at 05:43 PM | #

The same group of people (GoF) that loved Thurn & Taxis is now complaining about Notre Dame being multiplayer solitaire? Posted by Stephen Waits on Apr 4, 2007 at 06:02 PM | #

And not just 5 singletons, but 5 *low* singletons! Posted by Kevin Wood on Apr 4, 2007 at 06:54 PM | #

Oh I agree… But if you can get rid of 2-3 of those singletons via the pass and pick up a pair or 2 via the pass, you aren’t far off going out 2nd with a good chance of disrupting an opponent’s tichu call. It’s definitely not a dream hand by any account but it has some redeeming features. ;o) Posted by Jasen Robillard on Apr 4, 2007 at 07:16 PM | #

Please let Notre Dame be properly Alea-numbered - I want to buy that one right away. ;) Posted by E.R. Burgess on Apr 4, 2007 at 09:20 PM | #

I’m with Jasen here. If it’s before the pass and you somehow end up with a 6, those singletons turn into a straight, making it a winning hand (provided you don’t pass the dragon to your partner and barring a nasty wish). But more important: please, sort your cards properly! Don’t make us OCD types suffer like this! Posted by Peter Hein van Mulligen on Apr 5, 2007 at 01:49 AM | #

All: The Tichu hand was before the pass. It didn’t improve afterward. Peter: Sort my cards how? I tend not to sort my cards in trick-taking games and other similar card games, and while this does confuse opponents and partner on occasion—"How is 59687 a straight?"—I prefer not to reveal too much about my hand by sorting it. E.R.: The only copies of Notre Dame here are German, so I can’t report the status of the “11” to you. Stephen: I might be hearing the complaints from those who didn’t enjoy Thurn and Taxis. Not everyone at the Gathering is a fan of T&T, nor the released-in-Germany expansion. Posted by W. Eric Martin on Apr 5, 2007 at 04:20 AM | #

I think T&T occupies a strange place in the Eurogame pantheon… It’s almost the “generic” Eurogame.  It’s non-confrontational, easy-to-learn, and enjoyable enough to play.  It has no sharp edges and often can be put forth as an option when no one can agree on what to play. These are not meant to be criticisms of it.  Because of this, it really seems like the kind of game that doesn’t warrant an expansion, especially one with the words “power” and “glory” in the title. Posted by Kevin Wood on Apr 5, 2007 at 06:51 AM | #

This is a game about the postal service. “Power and Glory” doesn’t seem like a natural fit? ;) Posted by E.R. Burgess on Apr 5, 2007 at 08:48 AM | #

Trip 8’s ,a bomb , a dragon and 2/3/4/5/7..Pass the 4/5 off 7 to your partner. Probably get a 2 or a 3 for a 8’s full house. Doesn’t look too shabby. Posted by Michael Chapel on Apr 5, 2007 at 10:45 AM | #

"A weak right-hand player might even excessively benefit the player to his left, but I think it’s far too early to denounce the game on those grounds.” I noticed this after my first game of Notre Dame as well and I think it’s a genuine issue. However, it is easily fixed in the same way Fairy Tale fixes the problem: every turn you alternate passing direction. Posted by Mike Pennisi on Apr 6, 2007 at 09:03 AM | #

Of the 300+ GoF-participants I think you’ll find people liking and disliking all the games, so it’s not such a strange thing that among these 300 you finde some who enhjoy T&T and some (maybe not even the same people) that dislike Notre Dame. Posted by Trond Braut on Apr 6, 2007 at 01:51 PM | #

Michael Chapel wrote: “Trip 8’s ,a bomb , a dragon and 2/3/4/5/7..Pass the 4/5 off 7 to your partner. Probably get a 2 or a 3 for a 8’s full house. Doesn’t look too shabby.” Good suggestion. I’ve played only a dozen games of Tichu, so I’m still missing basic stuff like shaving the blue 8 off the bomb for a potential full house. Mike Pennisi wrote: “I noticed this after my first game of Notre Dame as well and I think it’s a genuine issue. However, it is easily fixed in the same way Fairy Tale fixes the problem: every turn you alternate passing direction.” The problem with this solution is that a player then has five chances of receiving a particular card in one round. Players could instead pass left for the first three rounds, then right for the next three, and left again for the final three rounds. That said, I wouldn’t change the game until after far more plays to see whether this passing problem really exists. Posted by W. Eric Martin on Apr 9, 2007 at 12:51 PM | #

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