Patrick Korner: Random Thoughts on Recent Plays

Well, well.  Only three shopping days left Christmas.  I hope you’ve all been good girls and boys and will be getting piles and piles of games under the tree?  Or, better yet, you just bought what you wanted and convinced your significant other to wrap ‘em up as long as you guaranteed you’d look surprised and happy come Christmas morn (or eve, depending on whether you’re European or not)?

Good.  Before I forget, and since this will be my last column before Christmas: Merry Christmas!  Best of the season to you and yours, and may the upcoming year hold nothing but good news!

On to something else, and I won’t spend much time on this but I felt I should at least comment.  Recently, I cam across a review of Oh Pharaoh! (the Uberplay / Kosmos game) that had some rather scathing remarks about the quality of the English translation – essentially saying that it was so horrible and vague that an auto-translator must have been used.

Well.

Seeing as how I spent several hours working on said translation, and seeing as how I’m most certainly NOT a machine, I thought I’d mention here that the translation was as accurate as the German edition was, and that any vagueness in the rules was not the result of my translation effort but rather the original text.  It’s a fact of the industry that 99 times out of 100, the translator (such as myself) does not have access to the game being translated – in fact, most of the time we get a Word document to work off of and nothing else – no graphics, no art.  Under those circumstances, it’s difficult to predict where the rules will need additional effort and where they’re just fine.

Oh, and to that same individual who ‘borrowed’ the verbatim text of the FAQ I wrote on Uberplay’s behalf for the game and is passing it off as his own: I don’t really mind, and since Uberplay no longer has the file on their website it’s good that it’s available somewhere, but perhaps some credit where it’s due could be provided…

Okay, semi-rant mode off.  Sorry to waste bandwidth on something like that, but I didn’t want to leave the issue completely alone!

Games Played

This was a good week – in fact, the past month has been pretty good.  I got my third game of Railroad Tycoon in, and I still really like the game.  In fact, it’s probably going to land on my Top 10 list for the year – a strong indication of how much the quality of Eagle games have improved over the past year.  I won’t be writing my ‘year in review’ article quite yet, as there are still a handful of 2005 releases that I owe it to myself to try, but shortly after the new year I’ll be putting that together as well.  Oh, here’s a hint: Caylus will probably make the list.  I know, earth-shattering…

I also got a chance to play Shear Panic for the first time, as well as my first Russian front scenario for Memoir ’44 (Stalingrad, in case you’re curious, and the Axis won 10 to 8, in case you’re really curious).  Add in Elasund, Power Grid and High Society and you’ve got a pretty top-tier group of games for the week.

Shear Panic in particular I wanted to write a little about.  I played a 3-player game, and the rules weren’t that hard to understand – I don’t know about some of the comments I’ve read about the game being confusing, really.  We also had very little analysis paralysis issues – since you have a limited set of options, there isn’t that much you can really truly do on a given turn.  And since your option set will never expand, only decrease, we found the game accelerated as it went on.  And yes, there was much oohing and aahing about the cute little sheep figurines – they really do make the game.

Now, as for gameplay itself, perhaps I had too high expectations, because it felt a little flat.  Not bad, certainly, but not truly excellent either.  I liked it well enough to play again – but maybe not well enough to want to play it weekly, if you know what I mean.

Which brings me to Elasund.  Again, I think I was the victim of too high expectations, as I had heard and read repeatedly how much better than Candamir it was, and how it was proof positive that Klaus Teuber had some tricks left in his bag.  Well, I thought it was a fine game, but it didn’t quite have the ‘spark’ that some of Teuber’s other games have, in my humble opinion.  When I play Domaine / Lowenherz, I see genius.  I see it when I play Settlers.  I don’t see it in Elasund, sadly.  There are some clever bits going on, but the whole thing felt somewhat procedural and scripted – like the game was dictating to me what I ‘should’ be doing.  For example: The value of the irrigation plots can’t be overstated, since they are usually victory points that are hard to take away.  Also the city walls – victory points that are guaranteed are huge in this game.  Therefore, in the game I played, the players who knew what they were doing (which wasn’t me, by the way) promptly built lots of city walls and made sure to put building permits on irrigation spots whenever a pirate was rolled (which is a 7 in this game – sound familiar?).  I will have to play it again to see if this was just a case of me going into the game with false hopes (and perhaps tempered by slight annoyance at having to wait nearly an hour to start the game, thanks to a difficult commute and some slow play on the part of others) – I certainly hope I’ll come around to see the positive side of the game, since others whose opinions I value certainly do seem to like it a lot.

Well, that’s about it for this week – again, Merry Christmas to all (and to all a good night)!

pk

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