Larry Levy:  Pre-Gathering Blowout

Last Saturday was my last gaming before I make the annual pilgrimage to the holy land of Columbus, OH.  And a fine session it was, too, as I got to cross three items off of my list of 2006 Games I Want to Play.  Here’s my first impressions of all three.

Ur
Ur is an abstract game of conquest that I’d just picked up.  I was hoping that the extremely elegant design would make up for the abstract mechanics.  Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out that way.

It’s possible that a lot of you haven’t heard too much about this game, so let me give you a quickie overview.  Ur consists of 40 two-sided tiles, with each side of every tile showing a different action.  At the start of the game, 36 of the tiles are laid out in a 6x6 array, and each player begins with one of the remaining tiles.  Each tile in the display is a territory and can be owned by one of the players if it contains his cubes.  Before beginning play, players form their starting positions by, in turn, placing cubes on up to three connected tiles.  On their turn, players can do the actions on the two sides of the tile they hold.  There are five different actions in the game, including Agriculture, which lets the player add cubes to their tiles, Politics, which lets them redistribute their cubes, and War, which lets them attack other players’ tiles.  After the player performs these actions, he exchanges his tile with an unoccupied one in the array, thus determining what actions he can perform next turn.  The object is to end the game with your cubes on the largest and most diverse collection of tiles.

The game has a lot of good ideas, including using the tiles as both a playing board and to trigger actions.  But our game wasn’t too enjoyable.  It’s very likely that we had an unfortunate starting position.  Agriculture tiles are very important at the start of the game and you’d expect to see about 7 of these sides showing in the initial display.  However, we only had four, including two in close proximity and two others tucked away in different corners of the board.  Naturally, the first player grabbed one of the two nearby Agriculture tiles, which also effectively gave him possession of the other one (anyone trying to contest him would have been hopelessly hemmed in).  This gave him a considerable advantage which he never relinquished.  I’m sure that most starting positions aren’t as extreme as that, but there does seem to be a decided advantage to going first and I don’t see anything else in the game which counteracts that.  (It’s possible that the later players have a small advantage on the last turn, since they can spread themselves out during their attacks without fear of reprisal, but attacking is so expensive that this seemed to make very little difference in our game.)

Even with a better starting position, I’m not sure we would have warmed too much to this one.  There’s an awful lot of things you have to look at and consider each turn, but the end result is usually a small incremental gain.  There’s definitely room for clever play, but it feels more like work than play.  For example, you’d like to increase your Agriculture holdings, so you might want to swap your current tile Agriculture side up for an unoccupied tile near your position.  But these tiles are usually in considerable demand, so an opponent will probably either take the tile through a swap or occupy it herself before you have a chance to attack it.

I do want to try this again, to see if we just had a bad first game, but it really didn’t appeal to any of us.  Too bad, it’s such a clever design, but sometimes they forget to include the fun.

Hermagor
Hermagor came from the same order as Ur, but it had a decidedly more successful debut.  Designer Emanuele Ornella’s games (including Oltremare and Il Principe) are usually very densely designed, which can make for a bewildering initial play.  Hermagor certainly falls into that category, but it felt a little easier to grok than Il Principe.  The complexity here isn’t so much that everything is so closely intertwined together (they are a little bit, but not tremendously so); rather, it’s the more typical issue of wanting to do a lot of things but only being able to do a few of them.  It’s still hard to figure out an optimal strategy, but at least it’s fairly easy to see what affects what.

The grid auctioning system (which is somewhat reminiscent of Auf Heller und Pfennig/Kingdoms, and Ornella acknowledges the Knizia game was an inspiration) works quite well and provides quite a few difficult decisions.  Travelling to the different cities in the second half of the turn is more straightforward, but there’s still a lot of things to think about and a number of strategies to employ.  Moreover, it’s clear that good players will consider where they want to travel to when deciding on which tiles to bid on.  All good stuff.

I don’t consider Hermagor to be a great title, but it’s a quite a good design and a game I’ll happily play.  Ornella’s output continues to impress and he is a designer well worth watching.

Mr. Jack
I finally got a chance to play this two-player deduction game.  Okay, let me correct that—despite the advance notice, this is in no way a deduction game.  Even though the objective is to narrow your choices down to one, the information gathered is basic and automatically tracked.  Instead, what we have is a clever game based around optimally moving the characters and making the most of each one’s special power.

I thoroughly enjoyed my game and almost nabbed the Ripper.  I identified him by the sixth turn.  Unfortunately, he turned out to be the character who controls the manhole covers and he used that to escape just as his identity became known.  Alas, the murders go unavenged!

Between the two really good two-player games I played for the first time this month, I think I prefer Medici vs. Strozzi.  In that game, you feel the tension every turn, as it’s important to get your valuations consistently right.  Jack, on the other hand, feels like the more approachable game.  Even though a good deal of thought is required to succeed, there’s only a few choices available each turn, limiting the amount of analysis necessary at any one time.  The feeling of a mano a mano struggle is very apparent, but without an “in your faceâ€? aspect.  Just a very nice game that should have very wide appeal.

So those are three more games that won’t have to wait for the Gathering to make their debut.  As always, I’m really looking forward to next week’s festivities, both for the great gaming and the great people, many of whom I only get to see once a year.  On the gaming front, I’m looking forward to trying out Notre Dame, Die Baumeister von Arkadia, Die Säulen der Erde, and Struggle for Rome.  With any luck, I’ll also get a look at Caylus Magna Carta, Colosseum, and the new Jenseits.  And it wouldn’t surprise me if I get the chance to play Phoenicia one last time in its pre-production form.  Oh, it will be a fine week of gaming goodness!

By the way, I don’t know about my fellow correspondents, but I’m afraid you won’t be getting any on-the-spot reports from yours truly.  Nor will there be an article appearing in this space next Saturday.  Sorry, but you’ll just have to wait until two weeks from now to hear any of my exploits in Columbus.  I’ll try to make it worth the wait.

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