Patrick Korner: Aha!

This week’s column was supposed to be about the new Ticket to Ride: Marklin Edition, but my copy hasn’t made its way into the Great White North yet.

Oh well.

Then, it was supposed to be about all the great new games I’ve played in the past week, except that I didn’t play any.

Oh well.

So what exactly IS this column about?  Well, there were lots of options.  A compendium of my favourite Seinfeld episodes?  Nah, too Rick.  A synopsis of my favourite Beatles tunes?  Again, too Rick.  A statistical comparison of all the German designers, complete with annotations and insightful analysis?  Nope, I think Larry already did that.

And then it hit me.

When I came to, I’d come up with the perfect theme for today: The “Aha!� moment.

What is the Aha moment?  Simple.  It’s that moment, usually while playing a game (but occasionally after) where the game’s strategy becomes clear and you understand how to go about trying to win.  Pre-Aha, you’re floundering about, wondering why you’re doing so badly.  Post-Aha, you’re planning ahead, looking to optimize and figuring the angles.

Now, some games give up their Aha moment without much of a fight, while others are more coy about giving up their secrets.  Puerto Rico was, for the longest time, a real mystery to me, and then I read the truly amazing (and well worth a read) Compendium of Puerto Rico Knowledge (or something like that) on BoardGameGeek.  Suddenly, with a little help, I could figure out what made the game tick and how to try and bend its structure to my will.

The latest game where the Aha moment came about for me was my latest play of Princes of Florence.  I hadn’t played it in something like two years, but last Monday I got a chance to play it with a couple of original TCG members – Rick and Jeff.  And, unlike all previous games, where I was a pretty dismal last, I actually managed to post a respectable third-place score.  And now I don’t think the game’s multiplayer solitaire any more.  I think I understand how the auctions work, when you want to auction off something YOU want and when it’s better to auction off something that THEY want.  There’s a lot of interaction, but it’s subtle and not as overt as other games, where the blocking maneuvers are more in-your-face.

I can’t wait to play the game again – I’d been avoiding it for a long time because I was convinced it was an over-rated game, and now I think it’s too bad I didn’t get to play it more often.

Which segues nicely into a couple of other questions that will, like clockwork, raise their ugly heads around the Web every six months or so: how many plays should a reviewer give a game before penning a review?  And how many plays should a person give a game before giving up on it?

My thinking on the review issue is that the reviewer should play it as often as he/she thinks is required.  In other words, some people figure out a game very quickly, while others take longer.  The best reviewers are the ones who understand the basic mechanics and the way they interact right off the bat, and can then spend their 2-3 plays refining their opinion and looking for the subtleties that make a game great instead of good.  I don’t pretend to be that good, and so I go for pithy humour and odd turns of phrase in my reviews…

As for the ‘how many plays before giving up’ question, again I think it depends on the game.  I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I will not like Quicksand any more than I did the first time – which was not much at all, by the way – because I’m not a fan of the basic mechanic of movement dictated by random card draw.  There aren’t any subtle tricks that the game might have that will dissuade me from my original opinion, so I can handle not playing it again, secure in the knowledge that I’m not missing something.

On the other end of the scale is Lost Valley, a highly underrated game from Kronberger.  Because it’s a little complicated to understand, and because each individual turn feels like you have a huge amount of options, it’s hard to sort out what to do on the first play.  More play shows that there’s strategy in where you go, how far you keep away from other players, what you outfit yourself with, etc. – in short, lots of things that a single game would never give you the full flavour of.  And it would be a shame to miss out on a very cool game just because the first play felt sour…

Games Played

Not much to report on this time around as far as new games goes – I’m still waiting for a new set of games from overseas that I look forward to going over in more detail shortly, but for now I had to satisfy myself with playing ‘oldies but goodies’.  Including two more games of Tahuantinsuyu, the excellent Incan game from Hangman Games.  Turns out we were playing a very important rule wrong – the Sun cards in the game stay on the table for the entire year, not just the next People phase.  We had been playing with single Sun cards that were always removed after the People phase and replaced by new ones, which made for quite a bit more turnover.  And, having played it the ‘right way’ once, we all agreed that the ‘wrong way’ was actually better.  It meant that the really good and really bad cards weren’t to swingy – you might get hit with a bad card, but at least it goes away soon instead of continuing to punish you for several more phases.  Similarly, the pilgrimage cards, which give you lots of points, don’t stay put and provide some players an unfair repeat score.  I quite like the “Terminal City Gamers Variantâ€? and will choose to keep playing the game that way – I wonder what the designer would say?

Also on the table were Amun-Re and the Princes of Florence game mentioned earlier – lots of deep, meaty games to keep my happy.  And happy is a good way to be.

That’s about it for another week – see you next time!

pk

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