W. Eric Martin: Unity Games XIV / Vineta, Possibly

Last Saturday, January 26th, I attended Unity Games XIV, a 15-hour convention organized by folks in the greater Boston area that drew more than 300 participants.

I’ve attended a number of these biannual events since 2003, and my playing time has dropped with each appearance. One reason for that is that I started volunteering in the teaching area, which able gamer and all-around good guy Phil Alberg organizes to great effect. At each UG event, six to fifteen gamers each teach a gateway or hot title, often to first-time UG attendees but sometimes just to folks who don’t know the game.

Class Is in Session

After teaching Showmanager, New England and Masons at previous events, this year I went with the current hot stuff: Agricola. Despite it being more complex than the typical teaching game, I had five players ready to go a half-hour before the game was even supposed to start. (Geoff Speare, who was also teaching Agricola, experienced the same thing.)

Although I had intended to play the Family Game for the first time, I just taught, then watched—and surprisingly I had almost as much fun watching as playing. Since I knew the game, I effectively played all five positions in my mind, trying to psychicly push people into certain plays and cursing them internally when they didn’t pick up my signals.

Seeing the boiled-down version without the cards was interesting; the game play simplifies into a quest for grain/baking/ovens/animals and the value of the actions doesn’t differentiate to the degree that it does in the regular game with the cards. In my most recent game, for example, I had played two improvements that netted my a vegetable and two additional grain whenever I took grain, making the action far sweeter for me than my opponents. In the Family Game, though, the action was a mere one grain no matter who took it. I also saw more competition for the “Sow/Bake Bread” than ever before; some folks realized the importance of turn order right away and made sure to stay in control, while others saw the light only after they felt the sting of the rubber hoses.

As soon as the first game finished, more players crowded around, so I taught Agricola a second time to five newbies, once again placing myself in the watchdog position. The player to my left won both times, and I happen to be a lefty, ergo I have mystical powers. After each game, I showed players a sampling of the minor improvement and occupation cards, and they generally agreed that (1) the cards are incredibly cool in terms of making the game a diverse experience and (2) they could not have handled the cards in their first game.

Walking the Floor

I refused to teach Ag a third time and instead spent time with publishers and designers, talking shop and seeing what they’re working on. Ed Carter of Cambridge Games Factory was distributing the revised version of Glory to Rome to those who brought in earlier editions for exchange. The cards in the latest edition have a slightly nicer feel to them, and the player aide is incredibly useful—much bigger than what was included in the first edition, with explanatory text to keep players from having to turn to the rulebook. The artwork is still a miss for my taste. Maybe we’ll see something nice in the fifth edition…

Jefrrey Henning of Troy Press contributed a couple of copies of Albion: Kings & Kingdoms (due out Q2 2008) to the auction table, which raised more than $1,700 thanks to a wealth of donations from Rio Grande Games, Days of Wonder, Face 2 Face Games, R&R Games, numerous individuals, and some local stores.

The highest price fetched was for a premium edition of Caylus, donated by Ystari Games. The auction winners also claimed an amount of Geek Gold equal to their winning bid, which was a nice kick-in from BoardGameGeek.

Greg Lam of Pair-of-Dice Games was testing something new, but since “test” is the operative word, I’ll say no more about it now other than that I’d love to see a full-time publisher put some graphics money behind one or two of Lam’s titles to help him reach a broader audience.

“So There’s Still Time to Change It?”

Winning Moves had a few people on hand in the morning to teach Terra Nova and Conquest of Pangea, both published in WM’s Immortal Eyes Games line. In the afternoon, I was able to try a prototype of Vineta, which has been announced by Winning Moves Germany. The game may or may not appear from the U.S. sister company.

Since the game wasn’t in finalized form, I’ll give only an overview of Vineta. Players are gods who are peeved at the ill manners shown by the inhabitants of the island Vineta and eager to teach them a lesson. Well, not all of the inhabitants. Each player is trying to protect one region from being sunk; do so, and you’ll receive a bonus at the end of the game.

Each player has an identical deck of cards, some with numbers and others with special actions. A round (generally) lasts three turns, and on each turn players lay down one card from their hand, then reveal them in turn order. The number cards are assigned to a part of the island that touches the ocean, and at the end of the round, the section with the highest total against it sinks, with the gods who contributed to this destruction reaping the lost souls. (The souls come in multiple colors, and you’re secretly trying to keep one tribe of them alive and kicking.)

The problems with the game were two-fold. First, you don’t have a lot of control over what happens on the island. Well, you would with fewer players, but in our five-player game, most of the players felt like they were just along for the ride. No matter which cards they played in the first and second rounds, it seemed like the third round would undo all the previous work, making it difficult (or pointless) to plan ahead. If I readjust my head to family-game mode, this lack of control wouldn’t be a big minus, but I was expecting more of a strategy game when I started playing.

The second problem involves the scoring, or lack thereof. Players have only a few chances to score, so a lucky or unexpected turn of events can give one player a huge bonus and the game. In the reaping of souls, you can sometimes choose who will score and who won’t, a practice which leads to even scores across the board as the game progresses (something predicted by one player before the game started), which exacerbates the luck issue in the endgame scoring.

More opportunities for scoring would be a huge plus for this game, especially if they were implemented in a way that made the lack of control less of an issue. Give me a choice of when to play a mid-game scoring opportunity, for example, or scale the points in some different manner to make me care more about what’s happening on the island. Another possibility would be to adjust the bonus cards to make people care about two parts of the island or even three. This would allow some overlap between what players are trying to do and perhaps give you more clues as to what they might do in the future, which would manage the chaos somewhat.

Vineta wasn’t bad, despite the grumbling from two of the players, but it did feel like a game I’ve seen before. Here’s hoping the published game offers something slightly different…

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