Dale Yu: Gulf Games 18 Recap

As I told you at the end of last week’s column, the Gulf Games family descended upon Louisville, KY last weekend for 4 days of gaming, eating, drinking, and laughing.  I consider myself lucky to be included in this great group of gamers!  As many of you know, Gulf Games was originally set up to be a small three family vacation that would involve some games.  Let’s just say that it’s grown somewhat since those early days with over 100 gamers in attendance this year!

Gulf Games is the inspiration behind many of the other gaming events that I have been invited to (as well as the one I helped create this year!).  Gulf Games puts an emphasis on family – both in the nuclear family sense as well as the larger gaming family sense.  It’s nice to see all the kids running around and playing games.  It’s also a good excuse to sit down and play fluffy children’s games all week!

I’ve noticed that my habits have changed over the past few years at these gaming events… I am now much less likely to play games ALL day.  Now, I spend more time hanging out with my friends and catching up as most of us only see each other two or three times a year.  Though I no longer keep records of what games I play or whom I play with – by my best recollection, I played around 20 non-children’s games in 4 days!  And of that small total, I played 6 games of Iliade.  (The other games that I can remember are: Age of Steam (Reunion Island map), Desert Bazaar x 2, Ticket to Ride Switzerland, Buzzle, Tichu x 2, World Cup Tournament Football, Liar’s Dice, Gemblo, M:TG, Twilight Struggle, Mamma Mia, Vitrail, and something else that was so good I can’t remember the name of it).

Otherwise, much time was spent eating and drinking and laughing.  [Of note, scour the Internet for pictures of Chris Lohroff’s stuffed frog.  I’m fairly certain that the appropriate authorities have been notified.  Chris is going to have to register in his hometown and will not be able to live within 100 feet of a toy store!] The hotel complex was incredible.  I’ve been to my fair share of conventions/invitationals, and I must admit that the Jeffersonville Ramada was the best location I’ve ever been at for one of these events!  The bedrooms were cheap and clean.  The meeting space that we had was quite good.  There were a few issues with some dark spots in part of the room, but overall it was the right amount of space for our group.  The room had an incredible view of the riverfront and Louisville skyline.  Most importantly, there were an abundance of restaurants within walking distance of our hotel… I can think of at least 9 restaurants within a block.  I was there for seven meals and managed to eat at six different restaurants!  For me, it was the combination of all those factors which made it the ideal location for an event!  I hope that Greg Schloesser decides that he liked it too and brings Gulf Games back there in the future!

But enough of the introductory drivel – Here’s a little bit about the two favorite games of the week that I played:

Iliade

For me, this was the best new game that I played during Gulf Games.  I had just received the game in the mail the day before I left for GG.  It’s a new card game from Asmodee, and it comes in a blissfully small box.  It’s a card game set in ancient Greece.  The game handles 3 to 6 players, but IMHO, it shines in partnership form with either 4 or 6.  The game is split up into a number of battles (up to a maximum of eight).  In each battle, the objective is to create an army with the highest point total.  Gameplay is centered around playing cards down (either army members or weapons) or using cards to attack (and remove) opponent’s cards.  If you have the highest scoring army, you’ll get your pick of the victory cards available (for the most part worth between one and three points).  There are consolation prizes for those in 2nd and 3rd place as well.  And to make sure that you try your best, there is usually a card with negative points to be given to the player who has the weakest army.  There are also bonus cards worth one or two points depending on the types of victory cards you have collected – similar to the Largest Army and Longest Road cards in Settlers of Catan. 

The game has a nice balance between card play and hand management.  The reason for this is that you start the game with a hand of only 10 or 12 cards.  There is no limit to how many cards you can play each round, but each player only receives three new cards each round.  So, there is a delicious tension in deciding when you’re going to play a lot of cards out of your hand – because whether you win that round or not – you will be handicapped with a smaller hand for at least the next round, if not more.  The game can continue for as long as eight rounds, but can end immediately when any team reaches the appointed number of victory points.  In my 6 games, the game ended early five times.  In fact, in most of the games, there was someone/some team who would be able to achieve victory by the third round if the cards fell the right way.  As a result, there is tense gameplay through the entire game as you really have to keep an eye on what your opponents are doing so that they don’t sneak away with a victory when you didn’t even know they could achieve it!

There is some possible issue with ganging up on the leader, but I found that this game actually encourages the situation in a good way!  Given the scoring, it is the type of game where there can be wild swings in scoring as the bonus cards (worth two points each) often change hands as well as the negative scoring cards handed out in most rounds to the player with the worst army.  There game involves a bit of diplomacy between teams – i.e. “I’ll take out Alan’s elephant over there on my turn, and you take out Valerie’s chariot on your turn.  If we do that, neither of them will finish first this round and they can’t win the gameâ€?.  A few players pointed out that it might have a problem like Condottiere, but I didn’t see it.  The difference to me was that this game offers victory points for those in second and third place instead of rewards to only the winner.  This actually adds more strategy to gameplay because there are times when you may only want to play for second or third OR simply playing not to be last to avoid taking the negative scoring card. 

Overall, the game is quite fun and packs quite a bit of meaty punch for a card game.  The other bonus is that most games are over within an hour.  The negotiation needed in the game may not be for everyone, and though that is a game trait that I usually don’t like, it seems to be manageable in this one.  I constantly remarked this week that the type of negotiation you need is more like Kill Dr. Lucky from Cheapass Games than say Diplomacy or Traders of Genoa.  This one is definitely a keeper for me and will likely come out often.  It will also get to come to many a game convention as it is in a nice small box!

One note that I will add in closing is the game is awful with three!  It is so bad that I wouldn’t ever consider playing it again with three now that I’ve seen it with more.  The main reason for this is that when you play with three, there is only one victory card available – so that only the winner of each battle gets a positive card.  The problem with this is that it severely cuts down on strategic play because the goal of every round pretty much is to win.  In fact, the first game I played of Iliad was a three-player game and it was almost enough to make me put it on the prize table immediately!  I’m glad that I didn’t – all three of us who played that first game (James Miller, Valerie Putman, myself) tried it again later with more players and all of us had positive, if not glowing, reviews of it afterwards.

Desert Bazaar

OK, this is actually tied for my favorite game of the week, but in order to avoid even the slightest hint of favoritism or nepotism, I’ll place in a firm second place.  Desert Bazaar is the soon-to-be-released game from Mattel.  It’s done by the guy who did that great game called Mary Kate and Ashley New York Minute: The Game – you know, my brother, Brian Yu.  It is the first of (hopefully) a new line of games released by Mattel that are more like the Euro-games that we all play.  It is slated for release this fall, but copies have been made available to humble reviewers like myself.

Desert Bazaar is a great little strategy game.  It handles three to five players and should take about 30-45 minutes to finish.  In this game, you only have two options on your turn:  build markets OR add more cards to your hand.  When you build, you use the cards in your hand to place market stalls in the Desert Bazaar.  Each market needs colors from three cards in order to be built.  However, just as in Attika, you can use colors from adjacent markets to reduce the building cost of newly played markets.  You do get a two point bonus when you build a market using only cards from your hand, but this method of building quickly depletes your hand!  Markets can only be built to a maximum of seven adjacent tiles.  After this, you must keep at least one empty space around the entire border of those tiles – just as you would for a safe hotel chain in Acquire.  Depending on how you play your cards, you could be able to string together a large number of builds in the same turn!  The most I’ve seen so far is eight in a single turn.

The game also has a nice press-your-luck element in the acquisition of new cards.  Each turn that you choose new cards, you get one card of your choice.  Then you roll three dice to determine which other cards you will be able to get.  The catch is that you can only choose cards of one color when you draw.  If you are unhappy with the initial roll of the dice, you can freeze one of the dice and try to re-roll the others so that they match colors with the frozen dice.  If you get a match color-wise, you can draw cards for all matched dice.  However, if you re-roll and do not match the color that you froze, you’ll get no more cards that turn.

The game is quick and allows for a fair amount of clever play.  There is more strategy to market placement than I had originally anticipated.  Additionally, there is a nice balance of wanting to build as quickly as possible in order to gain more +2 bonuses versus hoarding cards to have a mega-turn (and thus be able to more easily control the direction of market placement).  For a domestic game, it’s certainly a turn for the better!  And it’s one of the first American games that I can remember that have placed the designer’s name on the box cover like we’re used to seeing in the European games.  I’m sure that there will be more in depth reviews coming out soon – I would assume by Rick or Tom – so I’ll leave it to them.  The game should be coming out this fall – look for it and buy it! 

Well, that’s it for this week. I’ll let you get back to Larry’s column from last week.  I know that I’m still only about a third of the way done with it!  (Just kidding – I’m really about halfway through it!) But make sure you check back here next week!  I’ll be introducing a fantabulous new feature here to BGN.  It’s so brilliant that I can’t tell you anything about it at all—and also so that Rick can’t put the kibosh on it before it gets posted!

Until your next appointment,
The Gaming Doctor

© 2006 Dale Yu

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Comments:

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I see that Rick has recently posted information that trumps that of this humble columnist.  Iliad should be released in its English form at GenCon. Posted by Dale Yu on Jul 26, 2006 at 09:32 AM | #

Glad to hear you enjoyed Gulf Games and the venue.  I’m already working with the hotel to bring us back again in 2008! I’m sorry I didn’t get to try Illiad.  I will certainly be searching for a copy. I am in agreement with your assessment of Desert Bazaar.  Kudos to Brian and Mattel for this fine game. Posted by Greg Schloesser on Jul 26, 2006 at 09:43 AM | #

Iliad is well worth it!  You should get a copy of it when you can.  You could certainly look at it in a similar vein to E&T: the cardgame.  Iliad is basically Condotierre in a smaller box with a more streamlined ruleset and less of the fiddly end-game problems that brought condotierre down.  The rules were also just posted to the Asmodee US site, so you could also give them a look-see. Posted by Dale Yu on Jul 26, 2006 at 09:51 AM | #

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