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Convention Report: The Gathering of Friends 2007: April 3, 2007
By W. Eric Martin
April 11, 2007
Another day, another immersive soaking in games both old and new, starting with a fresh take on one of 2005’s certified hits: Caylus.
William Attia’s initial game design took the Eurogaming world by storm, bowling over players at Essen, then winning the 2006 International Gamers Award and 2006 Deutscher Spiele Preis among other accolades. Attia, along with publishing partners Ystari Games and Rio Grande, now presents Caylus Magna Carta, a card game version of Caylus.
General reports about CMC classify it as 80% of Caylus in half the time, a good or bad thing depending on your point of view. The easy changes to note are the elimination of the favor track, the removal of purple cubes, and (most importantly) the lack of a communal set of building tiles. Instead of the common wood and stone buildings, each player now has his own deck of twelve building cards. Players shuffle their decks at the start of the game and draw a handful of cards. Throughout the game, players can pay a coin to either draw a card from their personal stack or discard all of their cards to draw a fresh hand, cycling through old cards when needed.
The building path has also been changed. Instead of starting with the same six pink buildings placed in a randomized order, you draw three pink building cards at random to start the path and remove the others from the game.
On a turn, a player either draws a card or filters cards (paying a coin), builds a building from his hand (paying cubes and placing it at the end of the building track), places a worker on a building (paying a coin), or passes (earning a coin if the player is the first to pass). As in Caylus, players can upgrade one of their buildings to a residence to earn an additional coin at the start of the round; the residences can be upgraded to blue buildings, which are available to all players.
At round’s end, players can hand in cubes to score bonus points, with their value dropping from 4 to 3 to 2 as the game progresses. Once the last of these bonus points are claimed, the game ends immediately.
I highly enjoyed Caylus Magna Carta, even moreso than Caylus itself because the building track was far more dynamic. The initial set-up of pink buildings sets the tone for the game. Will money be scarce? Food? Or something else? This set-up drives your early builds as you want to encourage others to use your buildings. (Instead of earning a victory point a la Caylus, the owner of a used building receives a smaller or less valuable benefit similar to what the owner of the worker claims. If the worker gets two wood, then the owner gets one; if the worker can buy one gold for 2 or two gold for 5, then the owner can buy one gold for 3.)
A second building of the same type often isn’t as good as the first, but it will likely still be used, especially since buildings seem to get converted to residences more quickly in CMC than Caylus. This change is excites me the most, as the mix of available building powers shifts throughout the game. CMC maxes out at four players, but if you really want to have the Caylus experience with five, then you’re probably fine with long games anyway and will stick with the boardgame. Otherwise I’d suggest giving this streamlined little number a try. (Just don’t mention the possibility of a Caylus dice game to William. His eyelid starts twitching uncontrollably whenever anyone does so as he’s heard this jest a hundred times at least.)
Although Code 777 isn’t a new game by any means, I was happy to give it a try after having it sit untouched on my shelf for so long. Each player can see a three number combination in front of each other person’s screen but cannot see his own; on a turn, you read a question card (e.g., “Do you see more yellow 7s or green 6s?"), then answer that question, giving a clue to opponents as to what they might have.
Of course hilarity ensued when Mark Edwards couldn’t initially distinguish the colors in this deduction game. Score one for the color-sighted! Then we realized only after a few turns that we had placed a number upside-down in front of Erik Arneson. Mark was starting to answer a question about the total number of digits not visible, when he was surprised to spot a 9 in front of Erik. Luckily Erik didn’t spot Mark’s double-take, which would have clued him in to the presence of a 6. Erik turned out to have the combination 5-6-7 three times. If you’re ever in doubt, perhaps you should just guess those numbers....
The same group of four players—the three above along with Kostas Nikolaidis—then played the French version of Medici, which includes three special power cards: the big ship (which lets you have six cards in your hold), the scales (which lets you win all ties during the scoring round), and the dreaded finger (which allows you to reauction one good in any player’s hold; that player must match the winning bid to keep the good, but if he chooses not to, he receives nothing as payment). All hail the finger!
Next up was Sakkara, a new entry in the Kosmos two-player line by designer Manfred Grabmeier. Players randomly arrange tiles in stacks of one or two on a grid, then they take turns placing two figures each on the board.
On a player’s turn, he can move one of his figures one space orthogonally, claiming the tile on that space. Both before and after a player moves, he can play tiles from his rack. Tiles can be placed into a pyramid for that player, starting with a ship and wheat, then continuing with nine other tiles, then four tiles on those, and finally a crown, or tiles can be used for spells and special effects to grab lots of tiles or move your figure in a special way. When tiles are used for the latter purpose, they’re stacked, then the opponent places them on the board for reuse. Markers can’t move up more than two tiles, though, so you often need special abilities from tiles in order to put these tiles back into play. Whoever crowns his pyramid first wins.
Aside from the random set-up, Sakkara is a luck-free game, and players can try to plan multiple moves ahead. Looking ahead definitely gives you advantages in terms of planning spells, which give you all the tiles in a line or circle or destroy an opponent’s ship or wheat (which prevents him from building). That said, you can’t plan everything because almost half the tiles start the game under another tile, which means you have to reveal them turn by turn and these discoveries will have you rethinking possiblities.
Sakkara was followed by Power Grid on the France board, a first for me. We used the new power plant deck that Friedemann Friese has been developing, and it added a lot to this game and the Power Grid system as a whole. I look forward to more details about this from FF in the months ahead. As for the game, we chose to remove the central and northeast region, which forced us all to build around the crescent. Playing third in the first turn, I chose an ideal starting spot, then played to keep everyone from invading my ground, thus holding onto cheaper building spaces into the later rounds, which let me save money and pave the way to victory.
The Loopin’ Louie tournament followed. Despite never having played the game previously, I gave it a go, playing six tournament games in an hour, including one devastating game in which eventual winner Brian Stallings destroyed all of his opponents in 1-2-3 fashion. Each time players sat down at a table, they asked about this particular Louie: “Is he fast? Does he float a lot? How much does he flip?” I suppose every game can be played seriously if you try hard enough.
I had played this Knizia design once and wanted another go at it with more players. Four opponents joined me, and I taught the game. Dragon Parade has a Trendy- or Members Only-feel to it in that you want to read the crowd and guess where the dragon might end its movement for the round.
Each player starts the round with six cards; cards come in two colors (yellow and red) and are numbered 1-8. On a turn, you play a card, then place a merchant of your color somewhere on the city path. Everyone does this three times, then you discard two of your cards and play the final card in player order. If the dragon lands on your merchant, you score points; if the dragon is close to your group, you score fewer points; and if the dragon is on the same side of the board as your merchant, you score one point.
Because so many players are playing cards, you don’t even have the illusion of control. You’re often just plopping down merchants and hoping for the best. The crowd was fun to play with, but I’m undecided on the game and want to try it again before writing a review for the site.
Since this game is still being developed, I’ll say nothing about my play experience except that you should never play William Attia in anything for money. Seriously, he’s a smart cookie.
This new release by Hans im Glück and Rio Grande to its SdJ-winning Thurn and Taxis falls between the definition of sequel and expansion. Power and Glory includes everything you need to play the game—rules, gameboard, cards, start player marker, scoring chits—except for the wooden houses, which means you need to scavenge these bits from your T&T game or else find replacement bits.
Many Gathering attendees were baffled by this decision, but from the publisher’s point of view, this might make sense. The retail price of basic T&T is $33, whereas the cost of T&T:PG is $25—an $8 difference that might make the difference between someone picking up the sequel or not. Perhaps the publishers assume that anyone interested in the sequel would already have the base game, so why raise the price? (Of course, Days of Wonder was slammed for packaging Ticket to Ride: Europe as a complete game instead of merely a gameboard, rules, and cards, so publishers can’t win, can they?)
Power and Glory plays like the base Thurn and Taxis game, with a few tweaks. The most important change is that the carriage, along with the Cartwright character, has disappeared. The only game-ending condition is a player running out of houses, which shifts the game from a competition between fast building and long efficient routes to one more geared towards pure efficiency. You can still be rewarded for building short routes since you can complete regions and score a larger bonus chit before someone else, but the pressure of the game ending when someone nabs a 7 carriage is gone.
In Power and Glory, players must build their own carriage from the cards they draw. Each city card depicts 1-3 horseshoes in addition to a city, and when a player lays down cards on his turn, he can add a city to a route or turn the card face-down to add the horses to his starting carriage (which comes with two horseshoes). When a player wants to score a route, he must have at least as many horseshoes in his carriage as the number of cards in his route. This mechanism keeps a player from ever having to dump a route due to not having the proper city card, but it does provide an additional consideration when drawing cards for the turn: Do you want the horses or the cities? The horses are discarded when you score a route, so you’ll always need more. An added bonus to this mechanism is that you can take cities that other players need, then turn them into horses. Magic!
The gameboard shows northern Germany instead of southern, and four towns are highlighted in yellow. These towns start with a one point chit for whichever player first places a station in this area, but players can’t claim more than one yellow city when scoring a route.
The short description of this game is more of the same, yet different. If you like one, you’ll surely like the other. Whether you need to own both is a question only you can answer.
Rüdiger Dorn has two titles with Ravensburger this Nuremberg season: Die Baumeister von Arkadia, which has received plenty of love and several whispers of Spiel des Jahres appropriateness, and Jetzt Schlägt’s 13, which will receive no love whatsoever from hardcore gamers.
Jetzt Schlägt’s 13 is a light family card game in which the goal is not to collect cards that total 13 or higher. Players take turns as the active player; on a turn, the active player draws as many cards as the number of players, then turns them over one at a time, giving each card to a different player before revealing the next card. Cards have number values from 0-4, along with 0-2 + symbols, which are points. Other cards show a single point (which is claimed immediately and not at risk), a U-turn (which removes the last card a player received), a 13 -> 18 (which raises a player barrier of destruction), and a counterspell (which lets you refuse one card).
When a player hits the 13 total, he discards all the cards in front of him and everyone else keeps any points they have. Run through the deck once, and whoever has the most points wins.
As I said, the game is light and is mostly about playing the odds as to what might come up on a turn. The decisions aren’t tough, but Jetzt schlägt’s 13 is fun as long as people play it in the right spirit.
I ended the night with another game of Factory Fun, one in which the machines I needed magically appeared on the table almost every single round. Either that, or I just had a better eye for what I needed than the previous two times.
| Pictures - Click the picture for a larger version | |
 | Kostas Nikolaidis and Mark Edwards test their mental skills in Code 777 |
 | Matthew Gray, Christian Moffa and Barbara Flaxington are put through the paces on Thurn and Taxis: For Power and Glory by Rio Grande head cheese Jay Tummelson |
 | Nine tables of Loopin Louie action, one of which features the author having his chickens handed to him |
 | Only one piece of pipe in an extremely efficient factory—my swan song in Factory Fun as I don’t think I’ll ever top this |
Posted by W. Eric Martin on Apr 11, 2007 at 10:00 AM in Special Features, Convention Reports, Convention Report: The Gathering of Friends 2007 / 1840
Comments:
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Very nice report, Eric. But we need a picture of you, so everyone can see who our fearless editor is! Posted by Ryan Bretsch on Apr 11, 2007 at 09:56 PM | #
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If my image got out, I wouldn’t be so fearless anymore. Posted by W. Eric Martin on Apr 11, 2007 at 10:03 PM | #
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I’ve read a lot of the gathering reports and think it’s interesting that 2 games that are slated for May delivery were nowhere to be found. I’m assuming that Stonehenge and Age of Empires III were not there as I haven’t seen them mentioned in any reports. With them being so close to release you’d think they’d want the buzz. Posted by Jonathan Greisz on Apr 12, 2007 at 06:39 AM | #
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Eric, I only count 9 machines in your Fun factory. Does this mean that the picture was taken before the last round, or did you have to discard a machine? Either way, it looks like you can still keep striving for 100% perfection. Still, though, I must say how impressed I am with what you did, since my factories usually end up looking like an epileptic spider making a web out of tubing. Posted by Scott Tepper on Apr 12, 2007 at 08:02 AM | #
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Jonathan, Mike Selinker did have a copy of Stonehenge on hand at the Gathering. I didn’t try any of the five games, but I know that some people did. Guess the intersection between those who play and those who write is nil. As for Age of Empires III, I didn’t see a copy. The Tropical Games website (http://www.tropical-games.com/) is finally up, though, with the game listed for a Q2 2007 release. That could still mean May, right? Posted by W. Eric Martin on Apr 12, 2007 at 08:15 AM | #
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Scott, I did discard one machine, so yes I could shoot for a higher score. What’s perhaps a worse (but more subtle) problem is that I have two separate machines on the factory floor. They touch, but they’re not inter-connected. I guess I should punch the timeclock again someday… Posted by W. Eric Martin on Apr 12, 2007 at 08:19 AM | #
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