Convention Report: The Gathering of Friends 2008: Stone Age, Ticket to Ride Card Game & X

By W. Eric Martin
April 12, 2008

So, the Gathering. That’s what I’m supposed to be writing about, right? Well, Ted Alspach thinks so anyway.

My plan before attending this largely industry-related event was to play as many prototypes as possible so that I can write about these games in depth as they appear. While I largely stuck to this plan – despite what Scott Tepper might say – this leaves me with little to say now, especially since my three favorite games of the show were all prototypes!

Rather than give a day-by-day description, an impossible task during the event thanks to a daily schedule of 20 hours of gaming and four hours of sleep, I’ll talk about particular games, starting with…

Game X

As a rule, you can’t write about prototypes unless the designer or publisher gives the okay. Valerie Putman, who is developing this for Rio Grande Games and has written a few words about it, taught me and others Game X on Saturday. I went on to play it sixteen more times over the next three days, teaching it to four other groups on the way. Apparently the “X” stands for Ecstasy because this game is addictive. Must...play...more…

I’m not sure what the game was like prior to Valerie getting her hands on it, but as it stands now, it’s an amazingly innovative design. I’ll go so far as to predict that it will outsell 2007’s RGG sweetheart title, Race for the Galaxy. Yes, really.

Stone Age

Of the published games on hand at the Gathering, the one being played the most was probably Stone Age. In fact, it wasn’t uncommon to see the game being played on three or more tables simultaneously.

This Michael Tummelhofer (aka Bernd Brunnhofer) design throws players back to the dawn of time when our ancestors first discovered how to make fire out of victory points. Okay, the setting takes a bit of a blow as the tiles that players compete to claim are straight resource-to-VP conversions, but that’s fine for me. I don’t need to mess around with some made-up archaic tongue to pretend that I’m a caveman. Hmm, that sentence didn’t come out right.

Players start the game with five cavepeople, 15 food, and a couple of resources from the list of gold, stone, brick and wood. The gameboard has areas for each of these resources (with claim spots for up to seven occupants), along with a toolmaker’s hut (one spot), fields (one spot), breeding hut (two spots, duh) and food gathering space (unlimited spots); the board also has a display of four cards and five tiles, with a spot on each.

On a turn, a player places as many cavepeople as he wants in one area that he hasn’t visited previously this round. Once everyone has placed all of their cavepeople, each player resolves all of his actions in turn, increasing his permanent food supply (from the fields), having a kid (from the breeding hut), making tools, gathering resources, or claiming a card or tile. Those final actions are central to your success: when on a resource space, you roll as many standard dice as the number of your cavepeople present, then divide the total rolled by the value of the item (gold is 6, brick is 5, and so on). You use these items to buy cards (which give you immediate benefits and endgame bonuses) and tiles (which give immediate points). You can use each tool to boost a die total by one. At the end of a round, you must feed your people one food each or lose points.

Stone Age is a worker placement game – something we’ve seen several times in the past few years thanks to Caylus, Pillars of the Earth, Leonardo, Agricola, and other titles – and the challenges of SA will feel similar to those games in terms of managing your dudes, getting more dudes, and claiming spots. The die-rolling to claim resources adds unpredictability that isn’t present in those other titles, and while some *cough* Larry Levy *cough* might call for averaging dice to smooth out the luck, I think the game works fine as is. You know the odds of success going into each round, and given the number of times that you’ll roll the dice, the luck will even out by game’s end.

I’ve heard comments that the fields, breeding hut and tool shack are more powerful than the other spots and will be claimed first in every round, something that did occur in our game, but perhaps with experience such predictable behavior will disappear. The one person who had played previously in my game destroyed the three newbies, making good use of the cards, which have an endgame bonus similar to Goa – that is, the collecting of different symbols for ever-increasing points. The cards also have bonuses based on the number of dudes, tools and fields you have at the end of the game. The main difference between the use of cards in Goa and Stone Age, however, is that the cards are face-up in the latter game, which means that you have a lot of control over which cards you collect, and consequently how powerful they’ll be.

Based on a single play, Stone Age seems like a fine game, while also being somewhat familiar. Hans im Glück has already released Stone Age, and copies should be available soon from Rio Grande and Filosofia.

Ticket to Ride: The Card Game

Four copies of the new Ticket to Ride: The Card Game arrived on Tuesday night, and they were opened and on the tables in minutes, with most groups playing several games in succession. I’ve already previewed the game elsewhere on BGN, so I won’t run through the rules again. Playing the game brought out a few impressions that weren’t clear from reading the rules beforehand:

1. The cards should have color icons on all four corners. Sure, the image inside the border has an obvious top and bottom, but those who lack the obsessive gene that some of us have – a gene that makes us orient all cards in the same direction – shouldn’t have to suffer through colorless corners.

2. The game play is boiled down to pure set collection, with the sets being the color combinations on your tickets. While some wags have tagged Ticket to Ride as a card game, the gameboard plays an essential role since you can (a) stymie other players and (b) score other than those for the ticket while connecting two cities. That’s not the case in TTRTCG, where the only points are those for completed tickets and the Big Cities at the end of the game. You can’t take a couple of small tickets and ignore them in favor of completing six-routes because the tickets are all you got.

3. The memory element can be huge. Once you move cards out of your railyard and into your On-the-Track stack, you can’t look through them again to verify which colors you have and how many jokers are available for fail-safes. When you play cards into your railyard, you kind of mentally check them off as available – well, I do anyway – but you can easily lose them to poaching, which means you have to uncheck that box. I’m sure some people will play with face-up stacks to avoid any memory element, but those people probably read the final pages of murder mysteries, too.

4. Train robbing is fun. When another player has cards of a color in her railyard, you can’t play cards of that color yourself unless you play more of them than she has – and if you do, she has to dump hers. Force an opponent to lose three cards at once, including a locomotive, and you might have destroyed any chance she has of winning. I speak from experience because…

5. I am the absolute master at this game! Okay, I played only once, but I won by a spirit-crushing margin of victory. I then laughed evilly, kicked a puppy and burned down a hospital.

All in all, it was a fun game, one that will reward repeated plays because you might be able to learn ticket costs, which will then let you suss out what people are trying to accomplish and crush their hopes and dreams.

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That’s all for now. I’ll return in two days with more impressions of new releases and other games currently on the boat to North America.

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Comments:

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I never actually read the rules for Stone Age, but Jay (Rio Grande) taught it that you start with 12 food (recently changed from 15). I also don’t think you start with any other resources. This really is getting played like crazy. You didn’t mention the best part of the game: the heavy-duty leather dice cup! Actually, it’s so big/sturdy that the box doesn’t even close completely when in shrink! Not only that the lid isn’t even parallel with the bottom (it’s slanted)! Re: “I’ve heard comments that the fields, breeding hut and tool shack are more powerful than the other spots and will be claimed first in every round, ... but perhaps with experience such predictable behavior will disappear.” No, those are absolutely the most powerful early. I like the basic “place your meeples in limited slots” mechanic from Pillars / Leonardo, but this game is much simpler, which for me is a good thing. I’ve played at least a dozen times and still happy to play. For balance, there are people who feel that the game is simple enough to come down to dice. Posted by Curt Carpenter on Apr 12, 2008 at 01:23 AM | #

Why isn’t “Game X” listed on Gone Cardboard? ;) Posted by Jim Cote on Apr 12, 2008 at 06:09 AM | #

Curt, you and I (and many others) have just experienced the Gathering effect: a game that gets played slightly differently each time someone plays it. The person teaching us Stone Age (who had played once before) told us that resources were limited whereas the photocopied German rules with our copy of the game said that resources were unlimited. The game was already set up with 12 food, while the German rules state that you start with 15 food. Maybe this is a German-to-English change as sometime happens with Jay/Rio Grande, but those details will become clear once the boat carrying the English copies arrives. I agree with your comment that Stone Age is simpler than the other worker-placement games, perhaps making this an ideal family entry into the genre. Jim, there’s neither a date nor a real title for Game X, so I’ll hold off on listing it for now. I think I’ve already set enough unrealistic expectations for this game for one day! Eric Posted by W. Eric Martin on Apr 12, 2008 at 08:14 AM | #

Just like a dealer, giving us a tiny taste.  Outsell RFtG?  I’m going to remember that prediction. Posted by Brent Mair on Apr 12, 2008 at 09:40 AM | #

The weekend before the Gathering Jay taught me the game using 15 food, then here he explicitly told me the starting food has been changed from 15 to 12. I agree that that is an improvement. Posted by Curt Carpenter on Apr 12, 2008 at 10:37 AM | #

"Game X” sounds like it is a filler game just like Race for the Galaxy if you played it so many times in so few days. Posted by Dan Corban on Apr 12, 2008 at 12:05 PM | #

RftG isn’t a filler game if my group plays it six times in a row. Posted by Brent Mair on Apr 12, 2008 at 12:11 PM | #

You can play “For Sale” 6 times in a row as well. That doesn’t change the fact that the game is light on the brain and playtime, aka “filler”. ;) Posted by Dan Corban on Apr 12, 2008 at 12:18 PM | #

"Caylus, Pillars of the Earth, Leonardo, Agricola, and other titles” Other titles like the Key series that invented the concept? Posted by Mike Siggins on Apr 15, 2008 at 06:21 AM | #

If you’re talking about Keydom, Mike, a lot of other people feel the same way.  I, however, still hold out for Bus and Way Out West as the progenitors, as Keydom’s mechanic still strikes me as being more like multiple simultaneous auctions.  Still, I admit it does feel quite a bit like a worker placement game. Posted by Larry Levy on Apr 15, 2008 at 11:48 PM | #

Larry, you can be forgiven forgetting it because so few copies exist but the worker placement game that started it all was Keywood in 1995. I can assure you that the designers of both Bus and Way Out West own copies of this little gem. I suspect the designer of Stone Age does, as well, as that feels very much like an updated Keywood. Posted by Ken Tidwell on Apr 16, 2008 at 10:15 AM | #

Ken, I’ve never played or seen a copy of Keywood, so I checked out your review from the Game Cabinet.  And while the game has multiple player tokens and population limits on the spaces, I’m still not sure this qualifies as worker placement.  There’s no distinctive action or power associated with each space, for one thing.  I’m not sure it isn’t more like the different tokens in Tikal than the workers in Caylus.  It’s obvious that Breese was doing a lot of exploring in this area in his early “Key” games and these designs may well have been a trigger for the first worker placement games that appeared soon afterward.  But I don’t think they get my vote for first appearance.  Still, with the forces of Sumo and the Game Cabinet lining up against me, my opinion may be but a lone voice in the wilderness.  :-) Posted by Larry Levy on Apr 16, 2008 at 12:50 PM | #

There are already some hardcore gamers who pretend to have “solved” Stone Age. The superior strategy is starvation. You lose 10 VP if you don’t feed your workers, but then those players claim that using all workers for getting resources instead some of them for food you will get much more VPs than other players that do feed their workers. It really seems that at the end of the game, players that use a starvation strategy will get between 170 and 240 VPs (depending on dice rolls). This seems more than with a mixed strategy. Kind of sad, that the rules allow this. Posted by Dan Rosewater on Apr 20, 2008 at 12:06 PM | #

Dan, I think those players you describe are yet another set of victims of the dreaded “Gathering Rules Syndrome”.  The rules in the box for Stone Age say that if a player lacks food counters to feed his people, he must lose a resource counter for each food he is short (and eating wood is surely less efficient than eating food).  If the player has insufficient resources to lose, he then loses 10 VPs *per unfed worker*.  That, my friend, is not a winning strategy to this game.  However, this is certainly not the first, and won’t be the last, group to have screwed up the rules to a new game at the Gathering. Posted by Larry Levy on Apr 20, 2008 at 02:16 PM | #

I also posted my comment to the Geek and several, including Dan, pointed out that the rules I quoted come from the rough translation of the German rules provided on the Geek.  The RGG rules are as Dan stated.  So there is either a mixup somewhere or a deliberate change of rules between the two versions.  Until this is sorted out, I intend to play with the “10 VPs per unfed worker” rules, since it seems to make for a better and less perverse game IMO. Posted by Larry Levy on Apr 20, 2008 at 02:59 PM | #

The translation was incorrect on this point, and has been removed. The German rules and the published English rules match. Posted by Dan Blum on Apr 20, 2008 at 11:02 PM | #

Geez, at least give me a chance to correct it! That being said, I see nothing in the orginal German that says “10 points per unfed person”. Posted by Jim Cote on Apr 20, 2008 at 11:10 PM | #

I thought it would be much less confusing in the future to just refer people to the RGG website for the rules, now that they have them up. And you are correct - the German rules do not say that you lose 10 points per unfed person. But your translation DID say that, which was the problem. Posted by Dan Blum on Apr 20, 2008 at 11:13 PM | #

Ah! I changed my local file after a discussion in the forums, but was unable to upload it to BGG last week because of some bug. Posted by Jim Cote on Apr 20, 2008 at 11:14 PM | #

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