Scott Tepper: Pirates and Sharks and Sheep…Oh My!
Winds of Plunder
Whooooosh! Did you feel that? It’s awfully breezy in here with all that wind blowing. What with the recent Before the Wind, Race the Wind, and Winds of Plunder, it’s a wonder we can stay on our feet. Better batten down the hatches! I just got to play the new GMT Games release, Winds of Plunder by Alan Newman, a couple of times this past week, and since Dale Yu did such a nice job outlining the rules (by way of Greg Schloesser), I can avoid those and concentrate on my impressions of the game.
Even though GMT Games is known for its wargames, the company did a nice job with this distinctly Euro-style game. The first thing thing I noticed about Winds of Plunder was its box. Normally, I don’t give the box a second thought (unless it’s oddly shaped like Tal Der Konige), but the box of WoP is made of such thick and sturdy cardboard that, for a moment, I thought it was made of wood. The rest of the components are equally well-made. The board is sturdy and well organized for gameplay with a couple of charts to help with scoring both during and at the end of the game. Anything larger than the size of the cubes used for wind bidding and marking ports would be distracting. The cards used in the game are the good, standard playing card size made from decent card stock. The victory point tiles and compass dials are made of equally good cardboard, so these should hold up well over time.
The rules to Winds of Plunder aren’t very complex. Both times I played (once with five players, once with three) it took us only about 10 minutes to go through the rules. One of the things I really like about WoP is the thought that needs to go into the wonderfully multi-layered decision of how many cubes to commit to the offering to affect the direction of the wind. The different destinations you have to consider—such as where you can use your Action or Buried Treasure Cards, or which port has the item(s) that you need the most, or which will help you complete your port reputation goals—comprise only half of the components of your calculation. You also need to decide the number of cubes you should offer to meet these ends by examining your opponents’ positions and likely goals.
As I was explaining the rules the second time I played, I was asked, “How many cubes do people usually offer in an attempt to control the wind”. My response was that it varies, and our subsequent game validated my reply. We saw people offering between 0-12 cubes in a variety of strategies to control the wind or control the Blackbeard tile so they could decide who plays first.
The decision of who plays first can be equally resonant. Since the victory point tiles change with each arrival at port, as do the different players ship attributes, going first or last in a round can hugely affect your strategy.
I did find a difference in feel between the three-player and five-player games I played. With three players, I had a little more control of my destiny. There were fewer variables to consider in making my decisions, and there was a little less randomness thrown into the game because fewer Action Cards entered into the gameplay. There was also less player interaction: less boarding of other ships and minimal movement of the Advantage Cards between players. This didn’t make the game worse, just different.
When playing with five players, we saw the Advantage Cards slip back and forth between the different players constantly. We also had much more boarding of other ships, which to me fits in well with the theme of a pirate game. Unlike most Eurogames, WoP has a mechanism that allows you to directly attack or steal from another player. The first attack teaches you pretty quickly the importance of weapons in the game. Having weapon inferiority in WoP makes you a target for boarding. Depending on the people you play with, this can result in a player who’s in a weak position having a difficult time trying to gain ground. The Action Cards can help ameliorate this disparity of weapon strengths, especially since players don’t to like to see someone in WoP in the position of clearly having superior weaponry.
In this respect, Winds of Plunder has a similar feel for me to Fire and Axe (aka Viking Fury). In both games, the players sail to different ports acquiring resources and both have cards that allow you to break rules. It’s my opinion, though, that the Action Cards in WoP are not as chaotically disruptive to the gameplay as those in F&A. For that reason, I like Winds of Plunder a little better. Unfortunately, I think the game drags on a little too long with five players. With three players, the game plays in a more reasonable time frame, but there is a reduction of player interaction that really brings out the theme of the game. This leads me to believe that four players might be the optimal number for Winds of Plunder.
Get Bit!
For something that couldn’t be more diametrically opposed, we broke out Get Bit, the recent Robot Martini game by Dave Chalker. Get Bit! is a filler game along the lines of Raj. Both operate on a single mechanism.
In Get Bit!, your objective is to have your swimmer survive longer than the other players’ swimmers. It’s the brilliant physical representation of the swimmers that makes this game as enjoyable as it is. Each swimmer is a different colored, fully-articulated robot. These robots’ knees and elbows bend, and they have hands and feet, as well as legs and torsos, that can be easily removed. But I’m getting slightly ahead of myself.
At the beginning of the game, the players put their swimmers in a line, with a shark card placed at the end. Each round, the players place one of their cards, numbered 1 through 7, face down on the table. All these cards are then turned face up. If anyone played a numbered card that anyone else played (i.e. we both played a #4 card), then their swimmers will not move this round. Starting with the player who played the lowest valued unique card, his swimmer is moved to the front of the line. Then the player who had the next highest unique card moves his swimmer to the front of the line, etc.
After all moving is completed, the swimmer closest to the shark loses a limb, then moves to the front of the line. This player also retrieves his previous played cards, whereas the other players must leave their played cards on the table. The exception to this rule happens when a player gets down to only one card. Then they may take all their cards back into their hand. Little by little, the swimmers are going to be diminished until only two swimmers remain. The winner is the player who controls the swimmer at the front of the line at that point.
You learn pretty quickly in Get Bit! that there is a little bit of strategy in choosing the cards you play each round. While you usually want to move to the front of the line, sometimes you may want to match someone else’s number if he is closer to the shark than you are. This will mean that his swimmer will lose a limb instead of yours. I also saw the situation happen where every player played a unique card. This resulted in the player who played the #1 card getting bitten.
A strategy that I tried was keeping an eye on the cards that other people played and hadn’t taken back yet, so that there’d be a lower chance that someone else would play the same card that I did. This tactic kept me alive during most of the game, but didn’t help me enough to win.
Overall, I liked Get Bit. The game moves along very quickly, and the production value of the game is fantastic. Robot Martini could have easily made little cards for the swimmers and kept track of the body losses with some sort of score track. That would have been much cheaper to produce, but would not have come anywhere near as close to the theme as the little robots do. The player cards are made of such a nice, thick, laminated card stock that they will last far longer than the amount of time it will take you to lose a piece from one of the robots.
My guess is that if someone doesn’t like the simultaneous choice mechanism, they’re not going to be fond of the Get Bit. But for a light filler, Get Bit! is a nice addition to a gamer’s library. My only suggestion is that if you’re playing with a full complement of six players that you don’t play with all of the swimmers 11 limbs. We played with six players, and the game lasted about 45 minutes which felt like it was about 15 minutes too long. With six players, I’d recommend removing a foot and leg from all the swimmers before you start the game.
Mother Sheep
We broke out another game with excellent components this week: Mother Sheep, by Jeb Havens and published by Playroom Entertainment. While not quite as big as the ones in Shear Panic, the ten little white plastic sheep in Mother Sheep are just as cute.
To prepare for Mother Sheep, a large oval with a picture of Mother Sheep is placed in the middle of the table. Ten small ovals tiles are placed on the table around the Mother, leaving a certain amount of space between the tiles. Each tile has a different sheep’s name on it, and one of the plastic sheep is placed on each of these tiles. A large rectangular Corral tile with the names of all ten sheep is set to the side of the table. Cards that have different combinations of five sheep names are shuffled, and one is given to each player. These cards are kept hidden. Your goal is to pen in the five particular sheep on your card with fences before your opponents fence in their sheep.
The crux of this game are the fences. The fences look like thin popsicle sticks made of cardboard and colored in blocks of different colors. For example, a fence might be 1/3 blue and 2/3 orange, or possibly divided into four different blocks of colors. At the beginning of the game, each player receives three random fences that they keep hidden from the other players. Three additional fences are drawn from a bag and placed face up on the table. These three become the general supply.
On a player’s turn, he takes one of the fences and adds it to the board. Several rules govern the placement of the fences, but the main ones are that you can have any number of fences emanating from the Mother Sheep, and new fences crossing over existing fences can do so only if they match color at the points where they cross. Also, if they cross, they must do so completely. You can’t have a fence just barely touch another fence. In addition, while you can have multiple fences cross a fence, there can be only one crossing per color block. So if a fence has only two colors, it can have only two other fences crossing it. On your turn, you can use one of your three personal fences along with the one taken from the general supply. Then the general supply is brought back up to three for the next player.
When a sheep is completely enclosed by fences, it is removed from its tile and placed on the Corral tile. The player who enclosed the sheep gets a free turn. If you are the first player to have all five of the sheep listed on your card corralled on your turn, you win the game. This may happen on someone else’s turn, and if it does, and they have all five of their sheep corralled, then they win instead.
It is possible, during the game, to end up with some situations that make it impossible to enclose a particular sheep: for instance a chain of two color fences that almost enclose a sheep but do not legally allow the sheep to be completely sealed off. The rules cover what to do in this sort of situation, but the fact that this can happen leads me to think that some gamers will use the “B” word to describe this game.
The other problem I had with the game is that it is possible for several players to have several sheep in common on their goal cards, while another player may have a few sheep that no one else needs corralled. This means that while multiple players will be working to enclose some sheep, one player might have to be working more on their own to accomplish their goal. This feels a little unbalanced to me.
While Mother Sheep is obviously geared not to gamers but to families who will fall under the spell of the cute plastic sheep, I wonder if it might be just a little too fiddly to get repeated plays.
Posted by Scott Tepper on Aug 13, 2007 at 01:00 AM in Columnists, Scott Tepper / 996
Comments:
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Thanks for the review of Get Bit. However, the reason your game lasted too long was that it sounds like there was a confusion with the rules. “My only suggestion is that if you’re playing with a full complement of six players that you don’t play with all of the swimmers 11 limbs. We played with six players, and the game lasted about 45 minutes which felt like it was about 15 minutes too long. With six players, I’d recommend removing a foot and leg from all the swimmers before you start the game.” Each player only has four limbs to lose: two arms and two legs. While the hands and feet do detach, they’re not a part of the game. Hope that helps! Posted by Dave Chalker on Aug 13, 2007 at 09:45 AM | #
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Dave, Thank you very much for the clarification. We must have missed that in the rules (which tells you how slaphappy we were when we played the game since there are only about, what, 15 lines of rules). The game would finish much quicker if you can only lose 4 limbs. I have to admit, though, that our groups derived some perverse amusement from detaching the little feet and hands, etc… so that near the end of our game, there was a diverse collection of dismembered heads and torsos swimming away from the shark. Posted by Scott Tepper on Aug 13, 2007 at 10:42 AM | #
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Thanks for the reveiws, Scott.
Posted by Jeff Allers on Aug 14, 2007 at 07:16 AM | #
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