Patrick Brennan: October Gaming

I started off last time by mentioning I was about to swan off around The Netherlands and France for a month with the family. Well, the swanning’s been done and won. I guess we could have delayed for a month or so and visited Essen, but I much preferred having the warmer weather of September.

Staying on a house boat in Amsterdam was very neat (on Raamgracht, if you’re familiar). I picked up Fits in a 50% off sale there, which we played a few times. Train to Paris, and we were about three blocks from Jeu Descartes in the Latin Quarter, and a bit further to Variantes where I picked up Palastgefluster and Amsterdam. Euro Disneyland was the holiday highlight for the kids. We then drove around the south coast for ten days, from Carcassonne round to Nimes, Avignon, Aix-en-Provence and into the Alps. Then the drive back up to Germany where Fleur has family, ending with the five-countries-in-one-day scenario: breakfast in Dijon, lunch in Luxembourg, ice cream in Bastogne, a break in Maastricht, dinner in Aachen – whereabouts I found a copy of Diamonds Club in a department store after wandering around the old city.

I don’t know that it’s good news really, but the good news is that the game prices anywhere I went were not too far off what we’re seeing here in Aus now, with the AUD strong and some decent competition between the online stores – which means, for the first time in a decade, I’m pretty confident that I’ll get a decent price locally and I don’t feel compelled to check European and US online stores to see whether there’s considerably better prices elsewhere.

Anyway, no new Essen games have arrived here yet, so the games played for the first time over the last month or so are a rather eclectic bunch…

• Automobile – It seems a game of continual planning for potential disasters, calculating how far you can push things. There’s some nice interleaving of mechanisms, starting with the character choices which dictate turn order and special actions. You want to go first to sell cars more easily in the first sell phase, but you want to go last to build the most advanced factory, see what the others are building, and therefore minimise risk and sell cars more easily in the second sell phase. Once played, the theme brings it all together well, but that doesn’t make the choices you’re faced with any easier, especially when you add in the obsolescence feature which forces people to continually sell off and build new factories to re-gain better position in the sell-off pecking order. It’s one for the business game lovers out there, not one for the thrill seekers. My initial rating was an 8, but I haven’t felt the rush to ask for it again, so maybe its over-mathy, over-guessy nature is not as appealing in retrospect.

• Diamonds Club – I’ve always wondered why what’s been deemed a classic Euro was so expensive until I finally got my copy and saw more pieces tumble out than sand grains on a beach. It’s a simple premise (get things, buy VP things) but well-executed. The action-taking phase has been given a new twist (with variable cost dependent on what’s been taken before), and there’s a nice tension between wanting to take things to spend, and investing in position so you can take things more cheaply in the spend phase. Different ways to invest and obtain victory points leads to a tightly balanced and interesting mid-weight Euro. I like it. Initially an 8 that’s gleaned five quick plays, but lack of variety in strategy and game play has resulted in a downgrade to 7.

• Amsterdam – My one and only play of this two-player version of the original Kontor was unconvincing. Simultaneous card play leads to development of a 7x7 plateau, where you’re trying to win more and bigger dockyards (through playing dockyard cards and placing them smartly) than your opponent. You’re hindered by having to play canal cards (which surround and close off the dockyard cards) to earn the florins to be able to play in future rounds. There wasn’t any tension, so I suspect I need to move this into the play-fast category to get enjoyment. A 6, and languishing for want of replay urge.

• Jungle Treasure – A decent kid’s game if they’re good enough to handle time pressure. You get a random number of card turns and you must execute as many special actions as possible before the timer runs out, be they build something out of wood pieces, toss a stone, grab a tile quick, or find the right coloured stones. It can be fun if you’re willing to want it to be. 4ish.

• Sorry! Sliders – How to turn Curling into a board game. As such, not much to it, but the pieces are great and it’s gone down well with the kids. Allowing different configurations and different game objectives helps it come out more. Crokinole still leaves it for dead. 5ish.

• Gouda Gouda – It’s a fairly uninspiring two steps forward, one step back dice game aimed at children, but which involves little decision making except for who to send back and therefore kingmake. I need to try the special chips to see whether the game can be saved. Saving grace was that it was only $6. 3ish.

• Station Master – Feels like a light version of Dragon’s Gold, with people forming temporary alliances to score the booty, the differences being there’s no negotiation and the players get to determine what the booty is (good or bad depending on whether they’re on or not). The box said quick-paced, and it delivered that, which makes the game enjoyable enough for a quick non-serious romp. 6ish, maybe a 7, which is more than I was expecting from an older Mayfair in the 70% off basket.

Some other games of note in the recent rotation include:

• In the Year of the Dragon – This hadn’t come out since the first rush, probably because the game play has negative continual disaster overtones, but the game was much better than I remembered.

• Fits – Five plays in, and that’s about as much as the provided boards can give, so I’ve just printed off boards #5-8 at Knizia’s site to allow it a new lease of life.

• San Juan – This also hit five plays, as it does most years. In our last game, the one player without a library won the game! Just goes to show…

Cheers,
Patrick

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