Larry Levy:  An Essen Session

My good buddy Jason Matthews, suddenly renowned game designer and fellow DC Gamer, just returned from his first trip to Essen.  When he wasn’t getting lost on his way to award presentations, he was playing and buying some of the new games at the fair.  Last Saturday, the group got our first chance to try some of these out.  Here’s my experiences from my initial exposure to the latest crop of goodies.

Actually, I only played two new games and one of them didn’t really debut at Essen.  That was Leonardo da Vinci, which came out a month or two before the fair.  But I hadn’t played it before, so to my way of thinking, it counts.  I played it twice, once with four and once with three players.

I think it’s very good.  Probably not great yet, but it may reach that stature, once we all get more familiar with the strategies.  I think the thing that impressed me most with the game is how smoothly it plays.  This is a fairly ambitious and involved design, but once the rules are explained, they’re very easy to grasp and the turns flow very easily from player to player.  Probably this is because you can only do one small thing each turn.  At any rate, this can be a hard thing to achieve, particularly in a meaty game, but it’s very rewarding when a set of designers can pull it off.

I think there are two key rules in the design.  The first is the decision to jump the payment for an item from free for the first place player to 2 florins for the second place player.  This really increases the competition for first place in the different city areas, which adds to the game’s interaction and tension.  The other is that you can’t add apprentices to an area if you’ve done so earlier that turn, so you have to add them as a group.  This means when you play to an area, you have to decide how many of these fellers you’re going to want to have there, which definitely rewards forward planning.  It also helps to speed the game along and means that the player with the most apprentices isn’t necessarily going to be the one to place last.

Although you can play this game by the seat of your pants and probably have fun doing so, to do well, you really have to plan pretty carefully.  Know exactly what you want to accomplish each turn and formulate your strategy to achieve it.  Once players get experience, I don’t think people will be too successful saying, “Oh, I’ll just hold back and take what’s cheap.â€?  With good players, ain’t nothin’ gonna be cheap, honey.  You’ll either have to be able to swoop in at the end, win through sheer manpower, or, the most likely option, show up in force.  I learned that lesson in my second game, to my woe.

Susan Rozmiarek, writing about Leonardo on her blog, said that she found the potential of other players to mess with your best laid plans to be frustrating.  I understand this sentiment, but for me, it’s been the kind of frustration that makes me want to get better at the game, rather than avoid it.  I got hammered pretty good in my second game; I fell behind the power curve in both money and workers early, then kept getting outbid (mostly because I was trying to accomplish several things during the turn, instead of focusing on the one I needed to achieve).  This was frustrating as hell, but I had no one to blame but myself.  Hopefully, I picked up some tips for doing better next time.  I will say that this might be a game where it’s hard to catch up from a slow start.

I’ve heard mostly good things about Leonardo and so far I have to agree with the majority.  Those who like planning games should definitely pick this one up.  I thought it played well with both three and four players.  It should also do well with five, although the extra competition might make planning even more critical (and could lead to some accidental screwage).  It’s not clear if the two-player game would work, but I’d certainly be willing to try it out.  At this point, I give the game a 7.5 rating, which has the potential to rise with further play.

My other game was Hameln, which we played with five.  I’m sorry to say that I didn’t care for this much at all.  My main problem was a lack of control.  You have a number of actions available to you each turn, but far too often, the activities of the other players eliminate many of these.  Thus, areas you’d like to activate become rat-infested because a player activated a neighboring area.  Or all the prospective spouses for your offspring are snapped up before your turn.  Or your cash is drained by a player marrying his daughter off to one of your sons (this gives you a new area, but it’s the family of the groom who has to pay for the new house).  So instead of four options, I’d usually only have one or two, and oftentimes, I didn’t want to do any of them.  For example, having babies is usually good, but near the end of the turn, you’d rather avoid it, since you know you’ll just have to pay for them or have them turn into negative VPs.  It just seemed like I kept getting my head bashed against a wall and that I had very little control over my fate.  Here’s a case where my frustration just led to me wanting the game to end.  Plus, the downtime was considerable.  Enough that I could walk away from the table after my turn, get a slice of cheese, and bring it back to feed the rats that had no doubt multiplied since I strolled away!

Despite this bad first experience, I haven’t given up on this game by any means.  For one thing, even though opinions at our table were mixed, no one else had anything near my negative impression.  The game does have some very novel and interesting mechanics, so I really want it to work.  I’m sure I played less than optimally, which didn’t help my experience.  Finally, I think five may just be too many players.  When you feel control is lacking in a game and there’s too much downtime, the first thing to try is fewer players.  Three may not be enough to make the intermarriage thing work, so four might be the sweet spot.  There are plenty of good games that only work with four, so that doesn’t bother me.  I want to hold off rating Hameln until I can try it again.  But with so many other games waiting their turn, this might take a while.

The other table also got a chance to try two other games from Essen.  The first was a four-player game of Space Dealer.  Jason liked this, but the other players had reservations.  The main complaint was that accidental cheating was inevitable and it was impossible to detect this.  They also felt that things were happening so fast that play became quite chaotic.  I do want to try this out, but even before I heard the comments, I wondered if this would necessarily be my kind of game.  I’ll pass along my impressions when I finally get to play.

The other game was Bambus Spieleverlag’s Greentown.  Jason said he spoke to co-designer Günter Cornett, who said the game is basically 18xx lite.  Kibitzing the game near its end, the 18xx inspiration was clear.  Players build roads (i.e., track), can upgrade hexes (to add to the complexity of the network), and then trace routes through the resulting network (i.e., run trains).  The big difference is that in Greentown, players also build structures that their trains, ah, tourists, want to visit.  Of course, the stock market portion of 18xx is totally ignored, but this is a reasonable development of the track-laying aspect of these games.

(Interestingly, there’s another game that came out in Essen which uses something that resembles an 18xx stock market, but has nothing else in common with the genre.  That’s Imperial, the latest advancement in Rondel technology from Eggert.  Players buy “sharesâ€? in different countries and the “ownersâ€? can choose to operate the country, or drain its treasury dry.  Put Greentown and Imperial together and you might have a very cool, and very strange, 18xx contraption.)

Anyway, Greentown went over quite well with the group.  Jason’s lovely and extraordinarily evil wife Vonda, a big 18xx fan, gave the game an enthusiastic thumbs up.  It does seem like quite a cerebral design; I wouldn’t expect much hootin’ and hollerin’ during a game.  But that usually doesn’t bother me.  Yet another intriguing game I want to try out, particularly since I’m such a big fan of Cornett’s.

There was quite a few other new games that didn’t get to the table, including both of the new Czech games, Graenaland and Through the Ages.  I still wonder if the playing time for the latter will prove to be a problem, but the theme is just so fantastic that I’m really rooting for it to work.  Besides, Jason, who’s been reluctant to commit to many of our longer games, surprised me by saying he played Imperial in Germany and liked it.  This, despite a three hour duration.  Maybe we willbe able to get some of these semi-monster games to the table after all.

I continue to find that my concerns about the lack of heavyweight games that I expressed last week may have been groundless.  Graenaland, and, particularly, Through the Ages, continue to get strong ratings.  Ur is turning out to be a real thinker.  Hermagor is being rated well and as a heavyweight.  And Greentown definitely is weighing in on the heavy end of the scale.  So I may have been hasty in my conclusions last week, a fact that makes me quite happy.  It makes me even more anxious to try out some more of these new games!  After I do, you’ll be the first to hear about them.

Preview of Ticket to Ride’s USA 1910 Expansion
Days of Wonder was kind enough to send me a review copy of the new expansion to the original Ticket to Ride.  I haven’t had the chance to play it yet, but I thought I’d let you know what it contains.

The expansion is housed in a rectangular tin box, which is good, since there’s no way you’d be able to stick everything you get into the original box.  1910 consists of 181 cards, in several categories.  First, all the cards from the original game are replicated in a larger size (to match the size of the ones in TtR Europe and Märklin).  To be honest, the small cards from the original never bothered me (particularly since hand sizes could get so large), but it seemed this was a minority opinion, so this will be welcomed by many players.  In addition, the larger size of the ticket cards means that they can now more clearly show the endpoint cities, with the two being superimposed on a facsimile of the gameboard, just as in Märklin.  This definitely makes it easier to find the endpoints for those unfamiliar with American geography.  In addition, the expansion includes the four ticket cards from the Mystery Train expansion that came out a few years ago.  The new material includes 35 new ticket cards, showing different endpoints, and a new Bonus card, which awards 15 points to the player with the most completed tickets (similar to the bonus in Märklin).

(By the way, the values on four of the original ticket cards are reduced, including three of the long, coast-to-coast cards.  This may be an effort to make the long route cards less valuable, so that they don’t dominate the game so much.  Interesting.)

Naturally, you can just play the standard game with the new larger cards, but the expansion rules provide for three other ways to play with the additional cards.  First, you can just use the new ticket cards.  They suggest using the most completed tickets bonus for this game.  Second, you can use both sets of tickets, together with both bonus cards, in one monster game.  Finally, there’s the “Big Citiesâ€? game.  Seven of the cities are identified as Big.  The 35 tickets (taken from both the original tickets and the new ones) that have at least one of these Big Cities as an endpoint are used in this game (the cards are appropriately identified on their faces).  By the way, the latter two games use the ticket drawing rule from Märklin (draw 4 cards, keep at least one).

Besides providing variety, the first two games will mostly benefit TtR veterans who find it too easy to identify what tickets their opponents hold from their early plays.  The Big City game, however, could represent something new.  Since each of the ticket cards emanates from one of seven cities, the competition for routes out of those sites could be considerable.  This could very well add to the game’s interaction and contention.  It may be good to play with this variant with even numbers of players, since the board tends to be more open with those numbers.  Or those seeking a more bloodthirsty game may prefer this option.  Either way, Days of Wonder and Alan Moon has found a way to give TtR fans more options, without radically changing any of the rules of this beloved classic.  It looks like a winning strategy and I look forward to trying out my new set of cards.

© 2006 Larry Levy

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What I can say about Leonardo is that the designers (Acchitocca) are really “hardcore gamers”, and the development of this game take several years of fine tuning and play-testing. There is a nice article “Leonardo da Vinci: designers note” (I hope to translate it soon for BGN) about the design of the game: you can read it here good play Liga Posted by Andrea Liga Ligabue on Nov 6, 2006 at 02:07 AM | #

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