Scott Tepper: On Building Triangles, Cubes, and Spaceships.

As Val pointed out yesterday, Rick Thornquist is traveling cross-country on his national Galaxy Trucker tour.  He made a short stop in Chicago and was able to teach me (amongst other things) how to play this new game by Vladimir Chvatil.  Since it seems everyone else has played and given overviews about this new game I don’t need to go into detail about its mechanisms and can start right in on my impressions.

During Rick’s rules explanation, it didn’t seem like Galaxy Trucker would be very replayable to me.  All you’d have to do is figure out what the optimal ship would be, and always build that model.  I was wrong.  Due to the randomness of the event cards, sometimes it’s advantageous to stock up your ship with guns, other times, guns might be a waste of prime ship real estate.  In addition, each type of ship component is not only limited in quantity, but also in orientation, so with multiple players, it is incredibly unlikely that you’ll be able to build the same ship twice.

For me, the shipbuilding phase, which is really the preparation for each round, is just as fun as the resolution of the flight phase.  Even though I usually don’t succumb to analysis paralysis, being timed to do activities normally doesn’t appeal to me.  Begin timed makes me nervous.  So at first I was wary of using a sand timer to delimitate the building of our ships.  Interestingly, though, it seemed like we had plenty of time to create our vessels, since it’s up to the players to drive the timer’s progress.  I even found myself turning the timer (sometimes inappropriately) to add even further tension to this initial phase.

The second phase, when the ships encounter events, is mostly about the results of what happens to the ship you built.  The players have a few decisions to make during this part of the round, but for the most part, they are just resolving the events on the cards.  This may be a slight oversimplification since players who peeked at the cards during the building phase may have an edge when choosing actions that will affect player turn order.  Being in first place will help when encountering planets, but will hurt when pirates attack.  So if you have an idea of what is in the deck, you can choose to participate in or avoid some actions so you’ll be in a better position for what comes up.

Galaxy Trucker has hints of other games, but is something so different (and is SO open for expansions!) that I’m going to be picking it up while in Essen.  It’s not a game for everyone, but it sure has a high fun to time spent ratio.

After Galaxy Trucker, as Rick and I were sitting and chatting in my game room, I realized I had my work cut out for me in finding a game for us to try that he hadn’t played before.  But I finally came up with Triangular.

Triagular, by Klaus Schroer, is one of those games that is so simple, but works so well, that you wonder why it hadn’t been invented before.  Each player has a set of colored triangle-shaped tiles.  A red triangle is placed in the middle of the table, and then the players take turns adding one of their triangles to the board.  If a player is able to form an equilateral triangle in any orientation (with any mixture of tiles and empty spaces in the interior) with their own colored pieces, they score points equal to the length of a side of the triangle.  When all the tiles have been played, whoever has the higher score wins.  The game doesn’t usually last that long, though, because of an additional rule.  If you are able to form an equilateral triangle with the red tile at one corner, and two of your tiles at the other two corners, you immediately win the game.

This last part adds the edge to the game, because as you are trying to set yourself up to score points and possibly win the game, you have to watch your opponent to block them from doing the same.  This is a very thinky game, especially as the board becomes more filled with tiles.  Triangular usually favors the player that has played before, as the game has a puzzle feeling that sometimes takes a while to get used to.  (I think Val would like this game if she could ever get anyone else to play it with her.) Along these lines, I thought I would defeat Rick when we played this, but he had no problem grasping the geometry and made pretty quick work of me.  I was able to redeem myself with the second game where I snuck a win under his nose.

To complete the theme of the evening, of playing new games where you build things with tiles, I pulled out Cubus, which I’d had for a while but had never played.  Cubus, by Rheinhold Wittig, is an odd, optical illusion “game” (we’ll get to that in a second) that was published in the late 80’s.  The rules contain a suggestion that you don’t see in many games.  Because of the perspective issues with the tiles, it’s recommended that the players both play on the same side of the table.

Cubus consists of 48 identically shaped cardboard rhomboid tiles.  32 of the tiles are printed to look like the sides of a wooden box, and 16 are printed to look like the top or inside of a box.  A box top and two side tiles are put together to start the game with one complete box.  On a player’s turn, they draw a tile and if they can, use it and any other tiles they may have to rearrange the board to make complete boxes.  You score points based on the number of boxes you are able to form and the number of tiles you used to do so.

Now, here’s the odd thing…While Rick and I were playing, it seemed that the moves were pretty obvious.  Either you could revise the current board to make it larger with the tiles you had, or your couldn’t.  So it all boiled down to what tiles you drew.  We actually gave up halfway through the game because it didn’t seem like there was any point to keep playing.  I’d really be interested in getting any thoughts from other gamers who have played Cubus and thought differently.  It seems a shame because the tiles are really nice.  Maybe there’s a game in there somewhere…

So Rick, thanks for stopping by and bringing game fun with you wherever you go.  In gratitude, here are some words of wisdom for your roadtrip while in the States...When you have to take the inevitable break at a rest stop, don’t bring your iPod into the restroom.  You don’t want to risk attracting Senatorial attention by accidentally tapping your foot in time with the music.

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