W. Eric Martin: Tuesday Mash-Up & A Chance to Win 12 6 Nimmt

I haven’t been able to concentrate much the past few days, so my column will wander about in a similar manner…

Designer games in strange places
Endless Games is not a publisher I’d associate with designer games. In fact, I’d classify most of its publications—such as Your Best Life Now: the Game, The Newlywed Game DVD Edition, and Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus: the Game—as product. They’re low-complexity games for people who want to socialize more than they want to strain their brain and discover a unique gaming experience.

Too neutral...

...and too juvenile

And yet Endless Games will soon publish Slide 5, an English language version of 6 Nimmt that replaces Pando Games’ Category 5 in the U.S. marketplace. “Even though most of our popular titles are based on retro TV game shows, we never try to pigeonhole ourselves,” says Brian Turtle, national sales manager for Endless Games. “Products that are licensed are more familiar and easier to get shelf space for, but because it’s a deck of cards, Slide 5 isn’t a major investment and isn’t going to set us back too far to produce a few thousand copies compared to a DVD game.”

Slide 5 is due out in July 2007, and Turtle says that Endless Games is still working on the art and packaging. “We’re trying to get away from the hurricane flags as points,” he says. “The first take was basic and would feature a very basic scoring icon such as a red dot or something. Then we got fancy and thought we’d make the icons bananas, but the game looked too childish. So now we want something that won’t distract you from the real heart of the game, but something we can use on the package to give it some sizzle.”

Can you suggest something better than hurricane flags, bananas, and bull heads to serve as point indicators? Something with graphic appeal that fits the Slide 5 name? If so, send your suggestion to Brian Turtle. If you’re the first person to submit the icons or images used in the published game, you’ll win an entire case (12 copies) of Slide 5.

The mock-up artwork does currently include a tagline near the top of the tuckbox that reads “Wolfgang Kramer’s 6 Nimmt.” “We do want to keep that on the game,” says Turtle. “There’s a marketplace out there that knows Wolfgang Kramer’s games, yet may not be able to get 6 Nimmt.”

Stephensons Rocket Is Awesome

At the start of 2007, I vowed to play at least 100 games that I own but have yet to play. As the end of March nears, I’ve marked 22 unplayed games off the list, so I’m right on track to meet the goal. The best unplayed-to-played game to date is Reiner Knizia’s Stephensons Rocket, which came out once with three players and once with two.

Stephensons Rocket, published by Pegasus and Rio Grande Games back in 1999, is a luck-free game with a non-randomized set-up, the only such Knizia game that I can bring to mind. The gameboard depicts an England subdivided into hexes, with a number of cities and towns highlighted on the map; the gameboard also shows starting stations for seven railroads. On a player’s turn, that player takes two actions from the following three choices:

• Claim a token from a city. Whoever holds a city’s tokens earns 1-2,000£ whenever a railroad line hits that city. The tokens also depict types of merchandise, and at the end of the game, the players with the majority and second-majority of each type of merchandise earn 3-6,000£.
• Place a station on the board, but neither on a city, town, or track nor adjacent to a railroad or another station. Whenever a railroad reaches a town, the players with the most and secondmost stations on that railroad line earn money based on the number of towns and cities (plus the original station) that touch the line. Players also earn this bonus at the end of the game if the railroad is still active.
• Move a train to one of the three spaces immediately in front of it, and take an ownership share of this railroad. Players with shares in a railroad can potentially veto a particular move, offering to redirect it by paying shares of this railroad. When a train moves adjacent to another train or another train’s line, that train merges into the other one, and the players who hold the most and secondmost shares in the disappearing railroad receive a bonus based on the number of towns and cities (plus the original station) that touch the line. As with stations, players receive an endgame bonus if they hold the most or secondmost shares in a railroad that’s still on the board.

The three of us playing—Ray, Max, and me—were all new to the game, but Ray grasped the important elements of the game first, namely that Stephensons Rocket plays somewhat like Acquire, except that you don’t have to wait to draw the right tile before you can merge businesses, er, railroads. What’s more, Ray seemed to understand right away that stations effectively serve as a second type of stock, and just as shares in a railroad can be swapped for another railroad’s shares in a merger, a railroad that merges effectively allows you to transfer stations on one line onto another line.

While Max and I built somewhat haphazardly, fiddled with city tokens, and collected small sums for driving railroads into cities, Ray built towards a long-term plan that merged one railroad into another, then still another. He transformed his share and station majority in one railroad into multiple payouts, then into another majority and yet more payouts. We made one tiny rules error that gave Ray an extra bonus, but he still beat us by several tens of thousands of pounds.

When I looked to where Max and I went wrong, I focused on the endgame bonuses. The bonus of 6,000£ for token majorities initially seemed large, but perhaps that was due to the hard number attached to it; by comparison, the bonus for most stations or shares was vague because we initially had no idea how the game would develop. For comparison, the god tiles in Ra present a similar scoring challenge initially because you have to weigh the concrete value of the god tile against the possibility of what it might be swapped for. Once you’ve played Ra a few times, though, you have a better sense of how to value the god tile based on the current game situation.

I took this knowledge into my second game, a two-player match with Dave, but I didn’t tell him anything about how the initial game unfolded. Seven turns into the game, though, he had collected a bunch of city tokens and a few shares while I had three stations on already strong railroad lines. His future ruin was clear to us both, so we restarted the game and he played a more balanced game of shares, stations and tokens. (But I still won as that one game of experience was incredibly useful for seeing the possibilities of how railroads could merge.)

The ability to veto another player’s movement in a two-player game is interesting because you can often prevent your opponent’s station from ending up on a railroad line—but you’re effectively throwing away one type of stock to protect your holdings of another type, and doing so is not always a good thing. Sometimes, though, you propose a veto and want the opponent to throw away stock to override it because his initial movement will still work towards your long-term goal, whether he realizes it or not.

Stephensons Rocket might not have luck, but successful game play does require you to incorporate the uncertainties of an opponent’s strategy, which ensures that one game won’t automatically play like another. Until the red and blue trains leave their starting stations, for example, you won’t know whether the mergers will be concentrated in the north or south, so you either have to hedge your bets by moving multiple railroads in order to build up shares and provide potential veto power or start moving the red and blue engines yourself, giving you a measure of control over the middle ground.

As with many of Knizia’s finest games, Stephensons Rocket presents players with the dilemma of wanting to take far more actions on a turn than is possible. You have to read the other players to predict how the game will develop, then do what you can to either push it in another direction or reap more benefits than anyone else.

Finally...

R.I.P. Ivan Ivanovich, 1990-2007 A good kitty who never met a lap he didn’t like

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