Larry Levy:  Labor Day Gaming

Last Satuday, my three-day holiday got started with a bang thanks to a great day of gaming.  We played four meaty games, all of them good, two of which were new or almost new to me.  Here’s an extended session report of a day that still has me smiling.

Industria
Three of us showed up early, so we decided to start with this Michael Schacht brain-burner.  Industria, along with Hansa, are probably my favorite Schacht games.  They’re two of his opaque designs, in which everything is so interconnected that it takes several games to figure out any kind of successful strategy.  (Dschunke is another Schacht game like that.) I really enjoy the challenge of working through these designs.

We had a very intense game, where the money, as always, was very tight.  Money management becomes just as important as tile evaluation in Industria (it reminds me a little of Goa in that respect).  For some reason, I never manage to get started with the technologies when I play and then it seems pointless to compete for them later on.  This pattern continued on Saturday, even though I made a real effort to grab one Tech tile early on (I was outbid).  It’s hard to win with just industries and, despite a huge push at the end, fueled by my Bank-Borse combo, I fell short again.  Still, it was a very good game and everyone enjoyed it.  For some reason, I hadn’t thought that Industria worked that well with three, but I’ve changed my mind now.

Cleopatra and the Society of Architects
We briefly played a very intriguing prototype (from Japan, of all places) and then were joined by two other players for Cleopatra.  Opinions were mixed on this one.  There were some very strange card distributions (one player got very few characters and another never seemed to draw any corrupted resources in his face down cards) and that may have colored people’s opinions.  But I’m thinking of lowering my rating as well.  It seems that in some games, you feel in control and the choices are very enjoyable, while in others, you don’t feel in control and you’re floundering and playing catch-up throughout the game.  Sadly, the latter cases are not rare and may even be in the majority.  I have to temper my criticism because my judgement of how I’m doing is still not precise.  Toward the end of the game, I thought I was in good shape with respect to corruption, but far behind in talents.  As it turned out, I had the second highest talent total, but I also had one too many corruption chips, so I was once again the main course at the Hard Crocodile Rock Cafe.  It didn’t really affect the results any (one player blew us away with 60 talents and hardly any corruption), but this kind of misjudgement has been fairly common for me, so it’s possible that my feeling of control would increase with a better idea of my status.  I still think it’s a good game, but I may not be so anxious to get it to the table right now.

Tempus
You may remember I played this once before and it did not go well.  The rules explanation was confused and all of us—me in particular—played poorly.  I was willing to chalk it up to a learning game, but my gut feel was that this was not a game I was likely to fall in love with.

Well, we played a five-player game last Saturday and I’m happy to report that seldom has my opinion of a game changed so drastically from its first to its second playing.  Tempus is very good.  No, it isn’t Civ-lite; it isn’t even a civilization game.  The trappings are there, but the execution is too abstract and generic; at no time did I ever really feel like I was building a civilization.  It actually feels more like Risk without the battles (if that makes any sense) or maybe a themed version of Go.  You occupy areas, you use your actions to try to spread your influence, and occasionally, you battle other players for choice real estate.  The game itself is actually quite abstract, but the theme is sufficiently strong and the actions and cards sufficiently varied that it never feels like you’re playing a pure abstract game.

This is very much a “so much to do, so few actions to do it withâ€? game.  You always want to do more than you’re allowed to.  Figuring out which actions to do and when to do them is easily the best part of the game.  The actions are quite basic, yet making the most of what you have is a very enjoyable challenge.

Using the cards you draw optimally is another fun task.  Generally, I think the wisest course is to use your cards freely.  Some of the players in our game clung to what they viewed as critical cards, waiting for the perfect moment to spring them, but the players who slammed them down and then drew more tended to outperform them.  This is good, because it’s more fun to play cards than to hoard them.  But using them well is still an interesting challenge.

I think the key rule of the game is that cities can’t be adjacent.  This, combined with the plethora of mountain spaces means that potential city sites are precious.  Even after my first game, I was aware of this and was able to cordon off a section of the board with many prospective sites.  But I wasn’t aggressive enough in getting tokens out to them (did I mention that there’s always other things you want to do?) and was soon beset upon by evil poachers, which doomed me to a middle-of-the-pack finish.  That in no way diminished my enjoyment of the game, though.

There wasn’t much combat in our game and I suspect most games will play that way.  However, there seems to be a great deal of indirect moves you can make against a player.  Moving into a nearby potential city site is the most obvious one, but even a simple action like making babies or drawing cards can profoundly affect an opponent’s move.  The game didn’t seem to suffer at all from too little interaction and I thought the amount of attacking was just right.

I continue to be bewildered about the complaints with the endgame.  There were a few attacks and people spread out, but there wasn’t anything like this orgy of attacks I’ve heard about.  The last turn wasn’t all that much different from the ones that came before it.  I really don’t understand what the problem is supposed to be here.

Are there some issues with the game?  A few.  The physical design is somewhat disappointing.  The cities can be hard to distinguish.  Including both purple and black was idiotic and is an issue in less than optimal lighting.  The cards have a weird coating and may be easy to damage.  The components certainly don’t kill the game, but they do make it harder to play than it should be.

I’m not sure that five is the ideal number of players.  The fifth player served to make the game longer and the last player to place at the start was a bit squeezed, but I didn’t see any corresponding value added by the additional player.  The game still played fine with five, but given my druthers, I’d limit future games to four or fewer participants.  Our game was a bit on the long side, although I probably contributed to that a bit by not being quite as snappy with my play as I should have been.

Then there’s the dreaded Three Hex Rule.  One player (unfortunately, my nearest neighbor) kept his forces to three hexes or less for practically the entire game and finished second.  With slightly better play, he might have proved to be a serious challenger for the win, but then again, we might have been more alert with our play and made indirect encroachments into his territory.  I have heard from more experienced players that the Three Hex strategy is doomed to fail and that might well be the case.  However, the problem might be that it’s attractive enough that players will be tempted to play it.  The issue then isn’t whether the strategy can succeed, but the effect it has on their opponents.  It’s very frustrating to be unable to attack a player who seems to be doing better than you.  At one point in our game, both of my neighbors fell to three hexes, which greatly limited my options for expansion.  Evidently, the rule was inserted by Wallace late in the design process, but its intent was not to provide an alternative path to victory, but to protect players from early elimination.  Frankly, I’m not sure this precaution is necessary.  Early play should be devoted to expansion and building up your population and card holdings; I would think early combat would be detrimental to both sides.  Given that the rule only seems to have unintended effects, and negative ones at that, I’d give serious consideration to either eliminating it or playing with some of the proposed variants (like allowing attacks on a 3-hex player’s cities, but not his stacks).  However, I also don’t think this is a major issue, so I’d also happily play with the rules as written, as long as the rule doesn’t get abused too often.

I am nowhere near finalizing my feelings about Tempus.  But after my two games, I’m definitely feeling bullish over it, despite its somewhat abstract play.  Right now, I’d rank it as my third favorite Wallace design, behind only Age of Steam and Pampas Railroads, and that’s pretty rarified air.  My rating is wavering between a 7.5 and an 8, but I’m still feeling good about the game a week after playing it, so that sounds like an 8 to me.  I’m looking forward to playing again sometime soon.

Canal Mania
One of our number had to leave due to the late hour, so that left four of us to tackle Canal Mania.  Despite the fine games that preceded it, this was the highlight of the evening for me, as I had heard nothing but good things about this design and was anxious to try it for myself.  I had high hopes for the game, but a little bit of apprehension as well, since I’ve never been a fan of the Ragnar Brothers.  I have little patience for games with downtime issues and tons of dice rolling, so I avoid History of the World (too bad, the theme is marvelous).  Kings and Castles is better, but is still plagued by downtime, and the less said about Blooming Gardens and Where There’s a Will, the better.  That’s not the kind of track record you want for the designers of a new game.  But CM seemed to be based on German-style mechanics, while still retaining the Ragnars’ usual fidelity to theme, so I was optimistic.

I needn’t have worried, as the game is excellent, very possibly my favorite new game of the calendar year.  I think the game’s greatest appeal is that it’s very easy to get into (the learning curve is about, oh, two turns), but it’s apparent that good play requires experience.  I spoke a while back about my love of games where it takes time to learn the nuances.  Obviously, the optimal case is a game which has this, but is also fun to play right out of the box.  It’s a hard combo to pull off, but it’s great when you find such a game, and Canal Mania fully qualifies.

From a design point of view, CM is a train game done right.  (Yeah, I know we’re building canals, not tracks, but this feels more like a train game than most designs that have choo-choos running all over the countryside.) You’re building canals, but you also have a contract to make the connection between specific cities, so the network follows history to some extent without aping it.  Limiting the number of links in each connection (a brilliantly simple idea—why hadn’t someone used this before?) means that the serpentine routes so common in most train games don’t occur.  At the same time, the limits are loose enough that you have some wiggle room and can include a few intermediate cities along the way.  Tying the goods production to the card draft is another excellent idea.  Finally, the game encourages players to use opponents’ track when delivering goods, almost always a good goal, but not always achieved.  It also makes building such commonly used track worthwhile, through the simplest of mechanisms (VPs are scored for cities, not links, so the minimum score for used track is 2, big enough to truly affect your score).  Thus, through the use of a very basic rules set, it’s all here:  realistic track building, pick-up-and-delivery, and sharing of track.  Accomplishing so much with so little is a very impressive design achievement.

The key track building rule is requiring that no two consecutive tracks can be of the same sort.  Even though this has a little bit of a realistic feel (mostly because of the necessity of using locks in real-world canals), it does feel somewhat gamey.  However, far from criticizing it, I applaud the Ragnars for learning from the Germans and abandoning rigid realism when necessary.  The resulting rule is far from outrageous, is easy to teach, and makes the track building much more interesting.  That’s the sign of a well designed game.

The various options in each of the three phases of a game turn is also a very good idea, not particularly original, but well implemented.  This structured approach means you have plenty of choices without them overwhelming you.  Even so, all these options could have led to some hesitant play for newbies like me, but the game’s owner had printed out the excellently designed player aids from the Geek which had been thoughtfully created and uploaded by Geek user David Siskin.  This made the game a breeze to learn.  Once again, I wonder why more publishers don’t include such aids in their games.  They greatly assist the learning process and really add to the enjoyment of the game, particularly the first time out.  Get with the program, guys!

I was a little surprised that there wasn’t more shuffling of the Engineers in our game, but that may also increase with experience.  But this is another fine idea in a game brimming with them.

In our game, I began in the northwest and quickly had more or less of a monopoly on the northern portion of the board.  This meant that I could safely ship goods in that part of Britain, but it also meant that I got no additional VPs from others using my track.  The latter proved to be too much of a handicap to overcome and, despite some impressive shipping points, I finished in last by a single point.  But as with Tempus, this did nothing to diminish my enthusiasm for the game.

The components for Canal Mania are top-notch (other than the lack of player aids) and I can’t imagine anyone missing the tea towels.  The cards and tiles are well designed.  The barges are very attractive and work well on the board, but they’re too big for the scoring chart—I would have preferred less evocative cubes for that task.  The board is solid and colorful and clearly labels the names of the quaint English cities and towns.  In fact, my new life’s objective is to one day live in Leighten Buzzard (very much a real town, as you can see here).  I’d get a smile every time I addressed an envelope!

(By the way, speaking of colorful names, my favorite new game title of the year, or perhaps of any year, is the latest Winsome game, which is about the early days of rail building in the Netherlands.  The title?  Wooden Shoes and Iron Monsters!  I asked John Bohrer where this came from and he said it was purely the idea of designer Han Heidema.  Great stuff.)

All right, back to the canals.  Any problems with the game?  Well, nothing’s perfect.  Using drafting instead of a blind draw or an auction was a smart design decision, but it does leave open the possibility of a run of bad (or good) luck.  I don’t think this is as serious a problem as it might be, because Dicken, Kendall, & Kendall (there’s a law firm for you!) have given you so many ways of mitigating such bad breaks (mostly through the judicious choice of engineers).  Being careful with your canal building probably helps as well (so you’re better off if one canal will be building on clear terrain next and the other on difficult terrain).  I think experienced players will deal with such bad runs of cards far better than tyros.

Other than that, my only concern is the game length.  We took a little over two hours and it’s hard to see how this could be lowered too much.  I think the game would be even better at the 90 minute duration indicated on the box and maybe we’ll be able to knock the time down with experience.  Even at two hours, though, this is a quick playing, but very involving game, one that’s easy to play, yet has plenty of scope for skill.  Right now, I rate it an 8, but that rating could easily rise, which would put it among my favorite train games of all time.

So it was a very successful day of gaming, with two new discoveries and a couple of old favorites.  I hope your Labor Day gaming was just as good!

The Apples Project
Just a reminder to check out Mark Jackson’s mad brainchild here.  I’m one of the voters and we’re having a good time ranking the greatest games of all time in a bunch of different categories.  Mark is just starting to report the results, so there’s plenty of good stuff still to come.

© 2006 Larry Levy

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