Scott Tepper: The Gathering 2007 Part 1

The 2007 Gathering of Friends has now come and gone.  You’d think that nine days of gaming would sate one’s appetite, but no matter how much time I have at my disposal to play games, it will never enough. The last two years I had brought power bars to The Gathering with me so that I wouldn’t be distracted by trivialities such as needing to take breaks for meals. This year I was only slightly less fanatical about spending every waking moment playing games and actually occasionally went out of the building in search of real meals.

Finally realizing that there was no way I’d get to play everything I wanted to play enabled me to relax enough and spend a little time outside of the hotel in Columbus.  I learned that while Chicago seems to have ten times the number of Starbucks than Columbus has, apparently Columbusians (Columbians?) really like their ice cream, as you can’t drive three blocks without passing a different homemade ice cream parlor.  Another interesting tidbit about Columbus is that people there seem to be extremely efficient about their alcohol acquisition, as there are liquor stores everywhere that have drive-up windows.  Finally, I can’t comment on the actual taste of this creation, since I haven’t been brave enough to try it yet, but apparently, people from Columbus feel the need to eat their chili on a bed of spaghetti.

All right, enough of the pleasantries.  I know you’re not reading this to learn about Columbus’ culinary peccadillos.  Let’s get to the meat of the week: The Games.

One of the great things about The Gathering of Friends is that with so many gameophiles getting together and bringing games from their personal collections, you get the chance to play many rare and hard-to-find games that you might otherwise never encounter.  When I’m deciding what games to bring to the Gathering, I try to pick ones that aren’t widely distributed.

Farlander - This is one of the harder to find games in my collection and was the one I chose as the first game to ever play with Eric Martin (who is a lot taller in real life than you would expect) and Stephen Glenn (designer of Balloon Cup & You Must Be An Idiot).  Farlander is a quick and simple game of conflict.  The variable board is made up of seven large hex-like tiles that are each broken into 3, 4, or 5 asymmetrical regions.  Everyone takes turns placing their knights (colored cylinders) onto the board until all the regions are filled.  You cannot put your knights into a region that contains an opponent’s knight, and there is a limit of five knights per region.

Once everyone has placed all of their knights on the board, the battles begin.  If, on his turn, a player has more of his knights in the regions surrounding an opponent’s region, the attacker removes all of the opponent’s knights in the targeted region.  The attacker then moves between 1-5 of his knights into the newly vacated region.  The attacker must always leave behind a least one knight to hold claim to a region.  The game ends when no more attacks can be made.  The player who controls the most regions wins.

The game plays in about 20 minutes and has a nice ebb and flow to it. It sort of feels like a wargame boiled down to just the essence of attack.  Because of the game’s simplicity and easy tactics, I’ve had a lot of success introducing it to gamers and non-gamers alike.

I did play Farlander again with Rio Grande demoer Ken Hill and artist extraordinaire, Ted Alspach (who did not bring any copies of Ultimate Werewolf for me to buy because he is, in his words, “a slackerâ€?).  Ken chose to simply humiliate Ted in the game and not completely demoralize him by eliminating all but one of Ted’s knights from the board.

Sunday evening, Frank DiLorenzo showed several of us a prototype.  As the game is still being refined, I can’t say anything about it other than it is a pretty quick game with a bluff mechanism that was designed by Kory Heath.

Sunday night, I played Taluva for the second time since BGG.Con.  One of my opponents was Scott Nicholson (of “Board Games with Scottâ€? fame).  The game was very close, but I surprisingly pulled out a win by one hut over Scott N.  I wasn’t overly impressed the first time I played Taluva, but this game is definitely growing on me.  I’m a sucker for tile-laying games, and this one has a tight feel to it and develops into a beautiful 3-D map as the game progresses.

Monday morning, I got to play Gheos for the first time.  None of the people I played with had played it before, and it wasn’t till near the end of the game that we started figuring out how powerful the ability to manipulate the board by replacing tiles can be.  Since the replacement of a single tile can result in a drastic change to the board, there is a certain “press your luckâ€? feel to when you decide to use your three scoring tokens. 

Two subsequent playings of Gheos made me question the inclusion of the Temple scoring mechanism in the game. I thought that this component is purely luck based, so a player could be at a slight disadvantage if they don’t draw any of these tiles.  All in all, though, I really enjoyed the game and am happy that I bought it.

Monday afternoon Peter Eggert of Eggertspiele asked Stance Nixon and me to test drive a prototype that had been sent to him but that he had not yet played. The game took us about four hours to get through, which resulted in several people coming up to us while we were playing and asking, “Are you STILL playing that?!â€?  The game had several good points, but needs more work.  I would have been surprised if the designers had had the game blind playtested before submitting it to the publisher.  Had they done this, I am sure they would have uncovered some of the gray areas of the rules that gave us trouble, as well as a part of the game that was so luck driven that it felt like it was added onto the game as a complete afterthought.

Tuesday, I had to take a side trip to Cleveland, so I didn’t get to play as much as I would have liked.  Luckily, though, that evening I got to play a game that made up in quality what I was lacking in quantity: a pre-print version of Caylus Magna Carta. My opponents in this game were Dale Yu (who was making me laugh with about every other sentence that came out of his mouth) and Valerie Putman.  The game feels very similar to Caylus, but is streamlined and plays faster.  If I was writing an English question based on this game for the SAT, I would state it something like: Puerto Rico is to San Juan as Caylus is to _____?  The answer would be Caylus Magna Carta. 

The big difference between Caylus and Caylus MC is that the latter does away with favors, and that the players all start with identical decks of building cards.  Everything else; the placing of workers, generation of resources, building buildings and the castle by trading in the appropriate resources, function as they do in the original game.  The result is a streamlined game that plays in about one-half to two-thirds the time of standard Caylus.

Later on, I played Zooloretto for the first time.  This game is similar to Coloretto, but in the reverse way as Caylus vs. Calylus MC.  Zooloretto uses Coloretto as a base, but adds more bells and whistles.  The bits are very nice, but I have to admit that I enjoy the basic Coloretto and don’t feel the need to add chrome.  I was in the minority in this opinion.  The other players I played with liked the additions (especially the switch to tiles instead of cards).  They enjoyed the fact that Zooloretto had a good theme vs. the completely abstract Coloretto.

For the last game of that evening, I taught several people how to play Objets Trouvés.  It’s definitely an end-of-the-evening-when-you’re-getting-punchy type of game.  We played with 7 players and I think everyone enjoyed it, although some people seemed to enjoy it more than others.  We did get a little crowd surrounding us though, which seems to be a constant side effect of this game.

Wednesday, I learned how to play Guatemala Café.  The game consists of two boards.  One board is preset with workers, plantations, boats, and bags of coffee.  As items are taken off this board, they are replaced with wooden sticks representing roads.  The other board is where the workers, plantations and roads are placed. On a player’s turn, they move a figure around the resource board and pick up to three of the items in that row or column and place them on the other board. The cost to place workers or plantations on the main board varies depending on the location and the type of item being placed.  Instead of choosing workers, plantations or roads on his turn, a player can instead choose a bag of coffee, which generates money and triggers victory point scoring for all players who have contiguous groups of matching workers with plantations on the building board.

I came in first place in the game we played, but I don’t think it was based on an inherent better understanding of the rules on my part. The game has a definite tactic and strategic feel to it.  You can make a long term plan of which colored pieces to acquire, but you must keep an eye on what other players are picking, and where they are building to prevent them from getting monopolies on particular colors which will let them run away with points when those colors are scored. 

Well, I am only slightly embarrassed to admit that I could have reported on more games in today’s column had I been diligently writing every day.  Instead, I chose to just take notes during The Gathering and use the time I could have spent writing on playing more games.  The downside is that I’m now scrambling to convert all my thoughts into something coherent after driving for six hours today.  It looks like I’m only about halfway through the games I want to tell you about.  So check back next week when I’ll report on several more prototypes and games that are going to be coming out soon.

(*Note: If I have given descriptions about any prototypes or pre-production games in this column, it means I have received express permission to do so by the designer or publisher.)

© 2007 Scott Tepper

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I hate it when people come up and ask “Are you STILL playing that?!” Yes, some games are long, get over it. Posted by Doug Orleans on Apr 9, 2007 at 09:09 AM | #

Thanks for the information, Scott. I have to say that Caylus Magna Carta is really looking very interesting. I prefer San Juan to Puerto Rico on most days, and I suspect that it will be easier to get folks to play Caylus Magna Carta than it is to get them to play Caylus right now (of course, we’ll have to see how it fairs against Pillars of the Earth, which is currently scratching the same itch pretty well. Posted by David Reed on Apr 9, 2007 at 09:36 AM | #

Oooh, so now you’re in a better position to teach Gheos! I’ve been wanting to play for quite a while. And now I’ve got two more I’m stoked to play, as well. While I liked Coloretto, the zoo theme and move to tiles I think’ll be hip. And Taluva sounds really interesting, too. I love tile-laying, as well, and the 3D aspect is way rad. See, I don’t get jealous of y’all and your little gathering… It just whets my appetite for new games! (OK, so maybe I get a little jealous...) Posted by Mike Holmes on Apr 9, 2007 at 10:13 AM | #

David, I’ll be writing about Pillars of the Earth next week, but here’s some foreshadowing: I really liked it. Mike, I realize now that I didn’t say all that much about Zooloretto, so I might as well tack it on here. In Zooloretto, instead of playing with chameleon cards of different colors, there are cardboard tiles with different animals on them.  On your turn you turn over a tile and add it to a wooden truck, OR you take one of the trucks and move the animals on it into one of the cages in your zoo. Here’s the problem: you only have 3 (or possibly 4) cages, and different animals can’t be mixed.  You will probably build up the quantities of animals that you are choosing to display, but all the time you might be collecting animals that you have no room for that will count against you at the end of the game. The theme works very well (although I wasn’t really crazy about the whole vending machine addition, although I think I understand why this was included), and there are a couple of cute tricks (like exchanging animals between cages, or stealing an animal that isn’t in a cage from an opponent, or acquiring both a male and a female of a species, which will produce a baby version of the animal) you can use to ameliorate your situation if you feel like you’ve got a crappy set of animals.  The fuller your cages are, the more victory points (and money) you will receive at the end of the game. All in all, it’s a decent game and had it come out previous to Coloretto, I am sure that I would like Zooloretto better. Posted by Scott Tepper on Apr 9, 2007 at 11:05 AM | #

Hi Scott, You should really try the Cincinnati style chili. It’s really quite good. One of the ‘secret’ ingredients is chocolate and it works. Connie likes it so well she makes her own version of it. Think of it this way. The extra carbohydrates will give you that extra energy to keep playing games longer! ;-) Posted by Randy Schmucker on Apr 9, 2007 at 01:46 PM | #

Scott - We’re “Columbusites.” Posted by Jeff Wolfe on Apr 10, 2007 at 11:14 AM | #

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