Matt Carlson: Post Gen Con Recovery – Senji

I’ve escaped the convention and am back teaching at school.  That means two things:  I have a small pile of new games to try out, and a captive audience upon which to try them out.

So far, I’ve been able to play a game of Senji at the local boardgame club Monday evening.  It was fun and I enjoyed the game despite losing one of my three provinces in the very first round.  I never had a turn during the game where I was able to give an order to three (or more) provinces in a round.  Despite that setback, I seemed to keep up with the other players and even took control of the Emperor for a round.  I ended the game solidly in last place, but not extremely far behind. 

We played the game with four players and it worked, but I believe the game will probably shine best with a full compliment of six players.  I’m sure it would be even harder to collect complete sets of one card per color to turn in.  While there are several ways to gain victory points, conflict does take a large role, if for no other reason than to expand one’s production of armies and cards.  The dice were not in my favor, but I don’t think I can completely blame them for my problems as I was tending to take risks in order to try to recapture some of my lost territory.  I’ll hold off on any final pronouncement about the game until I can play it a few more times and also try a full six-player game.  I will say that the theme has some great aspects.  You don’t know the pain of warfare unless someone has just offed your relative because you attacked first.  If you give away your grandfather for protection, you better remember who is taking care of him or you’ll quickly regret it.

I’ve also tried out Ted Alspach’s card game Rapscallion, distributed by FRED Distribution.  In this game you bid for several playing cards using bid cards.  Then everyone bids for another new bid card using a playing card.  Players regain their spent bidding cards (adding in the new bid card) and start a new round of trying to obtain playing cards.  After several rounds of this, everyone has about eight playing cards and tries to assemble them into the best possible poker hand.  Good poker hands earn points, with the best hand in a round winning bonus points and the losing hand losing points.  A side bet at the start of the round also awards a few points.  Finally, every player has two wildcard betting cards called Rapscallions.  You gain five extra points at the end of the round for each Rapscallion card you manage to keep.  The game goes through several scoring rounds until someone earns 100 points and the game ends.  There are some interesting strategies, although the cards can be somewhat fickle.  There are no duplicate bidding cards, so each player has a slightly different distribution.  Some have a great high card, but then very low cards while other players will start with a distribution that is more middle of the road.  I’ve played it only a couple times and I like how easy it is to explain, but I’ve not yet nailed down my preferred strategy or decided if the game is too fickle for my tastes.

The final game I’ve played is actually one I saw at last year’s Gen Con, Little Italy, produced by Playroom Entertainment.  It is a very quick filler (it says 30 minutes but we played two three-player games in well under an hour.) Players each take control of two colored cars and move them around a circle, trying to land them on either the money (good) or the police (bad) square.  Players roll a die for each active car, then set aside the die of the car they want to move.  By moving another player’s card onto the police location, a player will earn a small bit of cash, but the car’s owner will have to suffer the consequences (a loss of money).  Players continue to set aside a die for each car that is moved until a player has only one die left to roll, thus all but one car will move in each round.  There is some good strategy present as well as luck in rolling.  Setting up a good layout just before you get to reroll all the dice is a key part of the game, as is looking ahead to where the money and police tokens will land next.  I didn’t like how much the game allows individuals to interfere with each other; in a three person game it seemed a bit chaotic.  A player is often forced to choose which opponent they want to mess over, thus the game has a strong kingmaking feel at times.  However, the theme is fun and it easily plays in the stated time limit, so I can’t really complain.  I felt that things were less in my control than I prefer but we also had plenty of laughs throughout the game – the mark of a good filler.

I’ll write more in a couple weeks and tell you more as I continue to play my way through the most recent additions to my game library.

I was struck by Eric Martin’s recent commentary on his goal of Project 30 in which he attempts to teach 30 new games to 30 different people in 30 days.  That would be a very aggressive goal for me, but I like the spirit of the challenge.  If nothing else, I am finding it interesting to actually evaluate how much playing I do with new players introducing new games.

This would be the month for me to do it,.  School is starting back up, so I have a new crop of guinea pigs.  Gen Con has just happened so not only have I played a few new ones at the convention, I also added new games into my library.

Here’s how I did so far:

During my family reunion at the end of August, I was able to teach Ticket to Ride: The Card Game and play The Game of Life with my nieces and nephews for a total of two new games and four new players.

At the past two meetings of our biweekly boardgame club I got in a hand of the card game, Hill 218, a six-player game of Power Grid, and also gave the new Asmodee game Senji a try.  That gave me three more games and seven new players (when duplicate players aren’t counted.).

At Gen Con I played several games in the Rio Grande room and taught most of the ones I played to the group.  A game of In the Year of the Dragon followed by Race for the Galaxy got me two games and five more players for my count.  (If pressed for numbers I could stretch and claim one more person because Brian Yu had played In the Year of the Dragon before, but didn’t remember the rules very well.) More creative counting could include Khronos (four new players) and Dominion (no new players) because while someone actually explained the rules to us, I ended up being somewhat of the rules moderator once the games got moving.  (More for Khronos where I occasionally checked a few things in the rules than for Dominion which didn’t need much further clarification.) That means Gen Con provided me with two (up to four) new games taught to five (ten if I rationalize a bit) new players.

Then, of course, there is school.  With the start of school (conflicting with Gen Con as it does every year) I was able to bring in a few of my filler games and give them a test run on some of my student aides and a couple of the more dedicated boardgame club members.  (We won’t have our first official meeting until late next week.) I was able to get in a few games of Rapscallion and also try out Little Italy.  However, due to a little overlap with our local club, that was only five new players.

Adding everything up, that’s 11 different games I played in (teaching almost all of them) where at least one player was new to the game.  Counting the total number of different people involved, there were 19 people that I clearly taught to play a new game.  There were five more players who learned a new game with me, and then I could also include myself since I did teach myself several games in order to play them with others: a grand total of 26 different people.

I’m running out of people but I’d be willing to bet I could wrestle up “new” players at the first meeting of the school’s boardgame club.  Hmmm… I’ll have to think about a good new game for lots of players.  However, that would be gaming the system.

I’m rather pleased with my tentative results.  I could have predicted I would never get near 30 new games played in a month – I’m lucky to get 30 games played in a month – but am not all that surprised to find I taught new games to almost 30 different people.  I run in several different boardgaming circles and tend to be a game teacher in most of them, a role I don’t mind as it means I tend to get a stronger vote for what gets played.  Gen Con was a huge boost to my numbers, especially since I haven’t attended a second local gaming group or the school’s boardgame club yet this month.

Eleven games and 26 people, I’ll call that a good month and take a break from keeping a mental log about my gaming habits for awhile.  I’ll just kick back and enjoy the gaming that comes my way.  “Kicking back” being a relative term, as I’m hoping to get a bit more “deep” gaming in in the near future now that I’ve bought my copy of Agricola and a sixth-player expansion for Age of Empires III, and have a couple of other deep-ish games waiting in the wings as well.

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