Dale Yu: New Essen Games at Great Lakes Games

Well, I just got home from a weekend in sunny Ft. Wayne, Indiana for the 3rd annual Great Lakes Games.  Great Lakes Games is a cozy invitational event which draws people from the Midwest and Canada for a weekend of gaming and camaraderie.  It’s meant to be a family event, and it is quite nice to see the 20+ kids having as good a time as the adults!  The founders of Great Lakes Games are Dave Vanderark and Chris Lohroff – and I’d like to take the time to thank them for all their hard work in organizing the event and finding us an excellent venue to meet at!

OK, enough of the gushing and on to the games.  Great Lakes Games comes at a great time in the year for me as it has always been one or two weeks after Essen.  The timing works out great because it allows me to have a full weekend of gaming right at the time when I’ve got about 20 new games that I’d like to try out!  Below are my impressions on a few of the new games:

Through the Ages: This was the game I most wanted to play over the weekend.  Like many others, I had preordered the three games available from Czech Board Games without knowing much about them.  However, the description of this game alone, “a card-driven streamlined version of Civilizationâ€?, was enough for me to order it on spec.  The game is exactly as advertised, and after two plays, I can’t wait to get this one on the table again.

The rulebook is fairly long but inclusive.  The game can be played in three forms: the beginner game which only uses about 1/4 of the cards in the game, the advanced game which uses around 1/2 of the cards in the game, and the full game which uses all the cards available.  Each further version of the game keeps all of the rules from earlier version and merely adds extra levels of complexity of the game.  The downside of this arrangement is that some of the cards have little or no effect in the simpler versions of the game as some of their effects are not considered in the simpler forms of the game.

I have heard plenty of worries about the length of the game.  I am happy to report that we were able to play two 4P games of Through the Ages back-to-back, first the beginner version followed by the advanced version, in just over 6.5 hours including all rules explanations.  All four of us were new to the game, and we spent about 45 minutes setting up the game initially and listening to Valerie read the rules out loud to us.

The game itself is a nice civilization building game.  You have a set number of actions per turn which is decided by your type of government (you start with 4 actions per turn at the beginning of the game) that you use to draw cards, make food, make resources, have ideas, move people, fight wars, etc.  Like many civilization games, there are three “currenciesâ€? in the game: food, resources and ideas.  You use food to make people and to keep your people alive.  Your people can then produce resources (which are used to make buildings, army pieces and other objects) or ideas (which are used to develop new technologies which in turn make spiffier objects). 

There is a nice balance between the different tracks, and like most good games, you are constantly torn between different actions on your turn.  The cards come into play in a drafting mechanism.  Each player can see 12 cards up for offer.  Four of them can be placed in your hand for one action, four can be had for 2 actions, and the last four cost 3 actions.  On almost every turn, there is a difficult decision to be made: do I take a good card now at a higher cost or do I let it ride for a round and see if I can get it on my next turn for a lower cost?  The cards have many different actions and special abilities – including changing types of governments, providing new technologies to discover, giving your civilization a leader (with special abilities), giving bonuses to production of food, ideas or resources, etc.  I’d go into more detail, but to be honest, this is a game that has to be seen to be believed. 

Our beginning game took about 2.5 hours to play which included about 45 minutes of initial rules explanations.  The rules are set up so that you can read the rules and play the first two rounds as you read the rules.  This proved to be a great way to learn the fiddly parts of the game – how to move the different little bits around the board and to learn the flow of the game (and the movement of the cards).  The game comes with 1 small setup deck of civil cards and then 3 full decks (representing the three eras of history in the game).  The beginning deck only uses the small setup deck and the first of the three full decks.  The beginning game really serves only to teach you the basic mechanisms of the game and not much more.  Some of the cards in the first era are not as useful as they involve ideas not yet introduced in the beginner game.  Additionally, the game is more of a simultaneous solitaire game as the more complex rules involving conflict have not yet been introduced to the game.  Despite this shortcoming, the beginner game was very enthralling.  Though the majority of your play comes on your turn, there is enough going on to keep you interested on the other turns.  It certainly didn’t feel long while we were playing it. 

We all felt that the beginning game ended a bit too quick because we were all quite involved in the game as the first deck of cards came to an end signifying the end of the beginner game.  As we cleaned up, Valerie suggested that we move straight into an advanced game (as we all already knew all the rules), and it was quickly decided to go ahead and do that!  We took a 15 minute break to mingle and get some snacks, and then had a 15 minute rules reading to introduce us to the new ideas in the beginner game.

The advanced game introduces more conflict which makes the level of interaction much higher between the different players. It also adds the concept of happiness to your society as well as corruption.  The game was much more interesting as all of the cards were now in play.  We found that the game played very quickly, and it did not seem as if we had spent 3.5 hours playing it when we were done.  One thing which did speed up the game was that we were able to set up the next player’s turn as the current player was finishing his upkeep from the current turn.

Overall, I think that it is a great game, and one that I look forward to playing again.  Even if the advanced game was the most complex, it would still be a satisfying game.  The beginner game serves its purpose in teaching you the basic rules and flow of the game, but to be honest, I hope to never play it again.  I think that as long as one player has played the beginner game before, you could at least consider skipping straight to the advanced game.  Admittedly, the newbies will be at a disadvantage as they have no idea of what the cards might be like compared to a veteran, but it will spare them the less than ideal beginner’s game.  One reason to go ahead and play the beginner game though is so that all players can have an equal footing before starting a 3-4 hour long game.

I’m extremely happy with this game and glad that I pre-ordered it from them at Essen.  Right now, I have not been able to find anyone who is carrying the game for purchase, and that is a shame because it really is quite good!

Section X:  This was a new release from The Game Master which has you trying to get your prisoners to break out of an island jail by digging tunnels.  The idea of the game is great, but the rules leave a little to be desired.  There were at least three major rules which were not adequately explained by the rules and made it difficult to know if we were playing the game correctly.

In short, all of your prisoners start in the middle of the board.  On your turn, you draw a hex-tile which has tunnels on it.  Then you can play a tile from your hand, making sure that all the tunnels connect (a la Carcassone), or you can move tiles already on the board, exchange the positions of two tiles, or possibly rotate a tile on the board.  Finally you can either move your prisoners closer to the exit or you can place a door on a tunnel so that only your prisoners can enter a particular tunnel.

However, the rules are maddeningly vague on a number of important points so that we were never really sure how to rotate tiles or how to really use a door on a tunnel.  As a result, the game was less than stellar on the table.  I still hold out hope that a good game lies within, but it will take more rules clarifications than I’m willing to track down right now to find out.  I’ll hold on passing a final judgment until I have a better ruleset.

Space Dealer:  This is a new release from Eggert Spiele which uses sand timers to provide you with a real time gaming experience.  In the game, you are trying to set up a production machine on your home planet to generate goods which you can deliver to your opponent’s planets to score points.  The catch is that all actions can not be done unless there is a sand timer on the card.  Each player only has two timers with which to do their actions, so you have to think carefully about what actions you choose to do and what order you choose to do them in!

One problem with the timers is that they are woefully imprecise.  First, they do not all take the same time to empty.  In my game, the 10 timers included range from 44 seconds to 78 seconds, though most are within 4 seconds of the 60-second time they are supposed to countdown.  Furthermore, the timers empty at different speeds depending on which direction the sand is flowing.  Finally, there is a fair amount of inaccuracy in the timers even when repeating the timing in the same direction with the same timer.

At first I thought that the impreciseness would ruin the game, but in the end, the wide variability of the timers is such that it becomes a non-issue!  Before starting the game, we lined up all the timers and flipped them over.  We then put them in order from shortest to longest as they finished.  We discarded the longest and the fastest timers and then paired the rest together – one from the long end and one from the short end of the line.  Each player chose one set of timers and we set off to play.

Gameplay is fairly simple.  You can draw cards which have new technologies on them – but before you can put the technology in play, you need a timer.  Once a technology is built (for instance, a mine that produces a blue cube), you can place a timer on the card to have the action take place.  You can also spend time to advance your technology level in order to draw cards from the more advanced decks – which provide you with better cards.  Most technology cards have a top half which shows what their function is for you.  The cards also have a demand on the bottom part of the card.  This demand shows what cubes your opponent needs to deliver to your planet in order to score points.  It’s in your best interest to have your demands met as you also score points (though not as much as the fulfiller) for each completed demand.

In order to complete a demand, you have to take your cubes to one of your opponent’s planet.  Strangely enough, you do this with a timer as well.  The board itself is setup as a closed loop with one neutral planet between each of the player’s planers.  It takes one timer length to move each step along the way so you’re looking at a minimum of two minutes to deliver goods, so you need to be sure that you’re ready to deliver because it will tie up your timer for quite awhile!

The game itself is played in real time and lasts exactly 30 minutes.  It’s amazing how much action you can squeeze into such a small timeframe!  The timing mechanism is quite novel and really helps keep you focused in the game.  Furthermore, there are some tense moments as you watch your timers like a hawk in order to not lose time in resetting them onto your next action.  The only downside of the real-time nature of the game is that you really need to make sure that everyone understands the rules before you get started as there really isn’t time to go over any questions during the course of play.  As a result, the initial instructions can last 15-20 minutes!  But don’t let that deter you from trying this great game. 

These three games aren’t all that I played, but I’m saving my reactions to some of the other new games for future columns!

FANTASY FOOTBALL UPDATE
I lost again, but this was my closest game of the season!
But in the end, a loss is a loss. 0-9.

KID’S GAME OF THE WEEK / DWARF ROULETTE (Haba)

Designer: unknown
Time: 15-20 minutes
Ages: 4+
Can adults play too? Yes!

Dwarf Roulette is another Haba game that my children have been playing over the last few weeks.  It comes in a small tin.  The tin contains a whole bunch of colored wooden discs to keep score.  It also includes a round board on which you place your bets.  Finally, there is another cutout which is in the top portion of the lid with holes in it that serves as the roulette wheel.  OK, I know this isn’t the best description… Just look at this picture to see what I mean
http://www.moolka.com/jzv/prod/2348/Haba/Toys/Games/mini_games/Dwarf_Roulette

Basically, the game is designed to teach your kids how to gamble!  On each turn, you get to place two bets.  Your options are red/orange for a one-to-one payoff, you can pick a quadrant of the board for a two-to-one payoff or you can choose one of the twelve individual symbols for a three-to-one payoff.  Once all the bets are laid, one child gets to swirl the lid to get the ball moving around and then everyone watches with excitement as the ball settles into one of the holes. Payoffs are made accordingly and the game continues on until one player has either won all the chips or one of the kids gets tired of the game! 

Unfortunately, there isn’t much else to the game.  My kids have had a fairly good time with it, but even they tire of it after 15-20 minutes.  The biggest problem is that my five-year-old has figured out that most of the bets are sucker bets.  Getting a 2:1 payout for something with 3:1 odds doesn’t make sense to him.  And then clearly getting 3:1 for a 1 in 12 chance of a particular symbol is an even larger sucker bet.  Don’t get me wrong, he’s not a savant or anything – he can’t verbalize why he only bets on the colors, but he pretty much only does that now.

However, it still provides small doses of fun and excitement.  Despite its logical shortcomings, the kids still never fail to groan or cheer when the little ball finishes its movement.  It’s a nice small game that we can keep in the car or in a purse – and this is clearly another advantage of a small game such as this.

Until your next appointment,
The Gaming Doctor

© 2006 Dale Yu

---

Comments:

You must register with BGN in order to comment. Registration is free, but if you appreciate the news, previews, reviews and other material posted on Boardgame News, please consider becoming a member to keep the info flowing to your screen!

"Before starting the game, we lined up all the timers and flipped them over.  We then put them in order from shortest to longest as they finished.  We discarded the longest and the fastest timers and then paired the rest together – one from the long end and one from the short end of the line.  Each player chose one set of timers and we set off to play.” Brilliant! I’d much rather read about how people use a little imagination to solve issues like this than a litany of complaints. Very enjoyable reviews, confirming Through the Ages and Space Dealer as next year’s must-buys for me. Posted by J.M. Green on Nov 9, 2006 at 05:24 PM | #

< Back Home