Convention Report: The Gathering of Friends 2007: April 4, 2007

By W. Eric Martin
April 13, 2007

I’ve discovered the secret to writing efficient reports of games played at the Gathering: Play lots of prototypes. Typically you can’t write about the particulars of the prototypes you play, which leads to write-ups like the following:

“My Wednesday at the Gathering started in the afternoon by playing two games from one designer, who was showing them to a publisher’s representative. One game was an involved, heavy strategy game with a kind of set-collection/bidding mechanism and a unique end-of-the-round determining-first-and-second mechanism, and the other game was a multiplayer, luck-free abstract with a customizable gameboard and interesting hand-management aspects. Both games had areas that would need to be adjusted or fixed—the first game, its special action tiles; the second game, grossly imbalanced starting positions—but were solid designs overall. The four players spent roughly four hours playing the two games and discussing them.”

Wow, that was easy.

Following the prototypes came the Tichu tournament in which David Fair and I barely won our first match. We stormed into a lead of 830 to 370, then scored something like 75 points over the next three rounds, allowing our opponents to tie us. We nailed the final round—okay, we scored another 50 points to win, roughly 1020-980. A sad victory, but we took it. William Attia (him again!) and John Garnett took us out in the second round with good play and unexpectedly good hands in one or two rounds.

A blisteringly fast game of San Juan followed, with Gary Libby somehow managing to build two 6-point buildings and a chapel to demolish three other players, along with three games of Crokinole sandwiched around another play of…

Sakkara
Before I taught Patrick Korner how to play Sakkara, we heard about a problem with the game—a lock-up problem of sorts, believe it or not. Yes, only four years after Kosmos released Balloon Cup, it publishes another two-player game with the potential for broken and unfun game play.

Here’s the problem: Players need to build pyramids to win the game, and building pyramids requires players to place certain tiles in layer one, certain tiles in layer two, and a capping tile on layer three. If a player hordes all the pieces of a certain type, the other player has no chance of winning. The game does include one snake tile, and collecting and playing that snake tile allows you to take one item from the opponent’s rack—but if you horde the snake and a certain number of tiles, then the opponent is totally hosed.

Learning of this problem—something I hadn’t considered in my first game—transformed our game somewhat from a building game into a race game. Patrick grabbed the snake on the first turn, mostly to keep it away from me. I used a couple of spells to sweep up and sit on a large number of cornerstone blocks, but Patrick must have blinked because he didn’t realize that I was hiding the blocks from him. He never used the snake and was still working on the pyramid’s first level when I won.

Jay Tummelson says that he’ll include a rule of some sort in the Rio Grande edition of the game that will allow players to wriggle out from under a lockdown. I’m glad the solution will be in the printed version of the game rather than argued over endlessly on BoardGameGeek, but why Kosmos refused to solve this problem itself is baffling!

The final games of the night were another go at Thurn and Taxis: For Power and Glory—which worked just as well with three players as with four, although certain players (me) were inspired to build routes way too long for their own good—and a few games of Spinball. No pics this time, alas.

---

Comments:

You must register with BGN in order to comment. Registration is free!

No comments yet.

< Back Home