Tom V

Yes, he is a guiding light. Almost a greater authority than BGG. But not quite. I was interested to see that Peurto Rico for him is 101st (or was it 100th?).

However Tom does LoVe Ticket to Ride; which although has a simple charm, I'm really not that taken with it. Maybe I need to play it more, and with more people.

Quite rightly he loves Dominion. That's fine.

The best thing about Tom V's top 200 is the way he chose them. That seemed like an exciting game in itself!

Lost Cities - the card game

A number of good points were raised there in the Alhambra post, notably the fact that sometime you just want a game that will be quick and fun, and here's one such game.

I would not have come across this if not for the big Tom V, he rated this simple card game at a whopping No 14, much higher than its BGG rank of 143.

And why does he like it so much? Simple, it's very fast, easy for everyone to learn but with a surprising amount of strategy.

The aim of this 2-player game is to try and place cards to get you to one (or more) of five lost cities. You decide how many lost cities you want to attempt to find, however, there's a cost to each mission so if you over-stretch yourself you can get minus points.

If feels similar to Balloon Cup in that you only have two real decisions to make: Either you place a card on your side of the board to try and gain points by getting to a lost city, or you discard the card to the middle. The skill comes from furthering your own expeditions without helping your opponent (by giving them cards they might need).

It takes maybe five minutes per hand and you play the best of three. It's so simple but very addictive and whilst there's a certain amount of luck in which cards you draw, there's definite skill involved too.

Highly reccomended.

And here's me losing a game: but not to Jo, she can't beat me (much to her frustration!)

Alhambra

Game of the Year at the Essen games fair 2003, yet 184th on the BGG website. There's a reason for this: it's a wonderfuly designed game with regards asthetics and mechanics, but lacks depth of strategy and perhaps relies a little too much on luck.

So when am I going to play this then? There are 3 senarios:

1. When I'm tired and I don't want to tax my brain too much.
2. If I want to introduce someone to Euro-games.
3. If I want a game that I can play in under an hour.

It's surprising how often the above 3 senarios are common. Therefore it deserves a place on any gamers bookcase (or should that be gamecase?).

A little about the game itself:
you need to build a palace. You each start with a fountain and buy bits to your palace which you expand. Cleverly, the pieces of palace have varying amounts of wall around them, making it challenging to fit into your own palace (and often impossible). There are always 4 different things to buy, each with its own currency. When they are bought, something new replaces it at random.

There are 3 stages when scoring. The scoring system is very beautiful. In stage 1, points only go to the players with the most pieces of a certain type (e.g. if I have 3 gardens and my opponents have 1 each, I get the points). In round 2 the people with the second most will now also get some points and in round 3 the people with the 3rdmost get points too.

That's it! And of course most points wins.

In summary:
A tidy little game, that's swift on time and gentle on cognition. It lacks depth though, which strategy and luck-elimination junkies will get frustrated by. But then even marathon runners enjoy a gentle strole through a park, right?

My favourite 2 player Dominion.

Moat, Chapel, Village, Throne Room, Thief, Bureaucrat, Market, Witch, Mine, Festival. And ALL the curse cards!

I love the combination of the big money potentials, using the Bureaucrat and Mine combined with the Market and Festival, all doubled up with the Throne Room multiplier. Big money allows for plenty of attack cards and plenty of Thieving, and playing will all the curse cards ensures the Witch stays a constant threat, not just due to the negative victory points, but also due to the secondary hand dilution which is often more devastating. A Chapel is required if you’re going to compete in this sort of environment to remove all the curse and copper cards, and of course the Moat for some sort of defense. Villages and Festivals allow for long hand combos to allow you to get through the massive deck, for one hell of a big game!

Alternative Pandemic rolls #1 - The Prostitute

The Prostitute - Plays against the other roles, much the same as the Bioterrorist in the expansion pack. Instead of infecting areas, however, should the disease ridden Prostitute arrive in the same area as one of the other roles they become infected and carry round a cube until cured by another role. Should The role infected by the prostitute pass through a city on the verge of outbreaking, the extra cube would cause an outbreak. Of course the Prostitute can also work with the Bioterrorist, infecting him and using his body as the ultimate way to spread disease, however the accelerated disease process would only give him 3 turns to live.

Twilight Struggle

I totally agree with sam's insightful post on Dominion there and it made me think about Twilight Struggle.

Here's a well considered game and a well constructed one (both in the planning and in the quality that GMT games have produced). It bears a passing resemblance to other territory acquiring games such as Risk but in it's detail and it's commitment to a theme it goes way beyond.

From what I've been reading, this is a game which has been around for some time but which was little-known until recently when a few geeks descovered it and elevated it to the lofty rank of third in the Boardgame Geek top games list, it's since been re-issued and has been bought by a new generation of gamers, and here's one - me.

To give you a flavor of what the game's about I'll briefly describe how it's played (this could be tough!): It's a 2-player game, one plays the US and the other plays the USSR. It's played over ten rounds and each represents a four or five year portion of the 45 year war. During the game you will try to gain influence and control across the globe, but particularly in key battleground states such as Korea and Germany. The flavour and detail in the game come from three decks of cards (representing the early, middle and late war) which all contain key elements of the war (Cuban Missile Crisis, Korean War, Pershing 2 Deployment). During each round you will have eight cards to play and you take turns in placing them. Some cards can only benefit either the USSR or the US, some can benefit both and part of the skill in the game comes from minimizing any benefit you are forced to give your opponent. Each card contains an action and a value (from 0 to 4 or 5) and you can choose to use the action or to use the value to perform military operations around the board. Scoring comes from a number of areas but mainly from scoring cards such as the Europe Scoring Card: This will be randomly picked-up by one player and will be played at their discression during that round. You score points as detailed on the card, this typically involves the player with the most influence in that area scoring highest. The game ends as soon as one player moves 20 points ahead of the other, at the end of turn 10 or if ever you trigger a nuclear war by decreasing DEFCON to level 1.

So, when I first purchased the game I was, of course, eager to get playing. I took it home, unwrapped it and started to read the rule-book. This was a 40-page document but, somehow, devoted very few of these to explaining how to play, and I found it tough trying to understand what the game was all about, what we were aiming at or what was the point of doing the many things it said were possible. As such, I gave-up and quit after two-hours of trying to fathom it. I took the rules to bed later that day and a few days on I felt we could attempt our first game: We did, we started to play, we seemed to be getting things mainly right and the game progressed (very slowly) but we still didn't really know where to concentrate our efforts so a couple of hours into the game we gave-up (again). However, that was not a fruitless game, it set us up for our first (and so far our last!) full game which we completed in just shy of 4 hours and which I'm pleased to say I won.

So, is it good? Is it worth the effort? Will I play again?

Yes. I hope that when I gave you the brief run-down of the gameplay you started to get a feel for why you would play this game, it has everything that Sam felt was lacking in Dominion: A World-map for a board, a thoroughly cohesive theme where you really do feel like you're slogging your way through a bitter and protracted war, a low complexity scoring system where you can always see who's winning, dogs in space and the ever-present nuclear threat! It really is awesome in the truest sense of the word.

So, should you all rush out and buy it? No, absolutely not, if only for the reason that no other person should have to endure trying to learn this game by themselves! I really feel like the manufacturers intended that you would learn this game with someone who's played it before, the rules just don't compare to those provided in more modern games (they make the Puerto Rico rules like an early-learning pamphlet!). This is a long game, it was not just our inexperience which took it to the many-hour level of gaming, it simply has so many elements and such a lot of decisions that you could never play it quickly. It's also a 2-player game and could never be played with more.

Tom Vassel likes this game and says that every year he moves it higher up his list of favourite games. This makes perfect sense to me: It is one of those games which you start playing with very poor (or no) strategy and which I think would take a number of games before you could put together anything but a rudimentary strategy. In particular, it's hard not to solely concentrate on what is happening right now in your first game, but what you clearly need to have present in your mind at all times is the Middle and Late stages of the war (where different cards come into play and where your early moves could become very important). As such, this is a game which could take a lifetime to become any good at, and you'd need someone else who's going to put in the hours because you could never have a mismatched pairing.

In summary then, this will never be a game which you play regularly (for many it will be a game you'll never want to even try) but for those who like a well themed game, high on strategy and with the intensity you get from a one-on-one battle, there can be few (if any) better.

Dominion

I have to say I do love Dominion for many of the reasons below, but it can never be perfect. Stating the obvious its a card based game, devoted to expanding a kingdom. Sadly you get no visual feel for the kingdom youre set to grow except for the tactile weight of more cards in your hand. Theres no sitting back and surveying your kingdom, indeed theres no way of even determining from two decks who has a kingdom of coppers and poor houses and who has a deck of gold and provinces. Counter intuitively as you become more experienced at the game it pays to have a more streamlined deck so that the better cards have an increased frequency of showing up and therefore deck size has even less to do with progress in the game. This of course makes for an interesting game where it can be easy to loose track of who is winning and keeps everyone guessing till the end, however in a game which advertises ‘uniting people under your banner’ you get very little sense of progress through the game.

Its probably the best card based game ive played, but it will never beat truly board based games. If im growing a kingdom, I want to be able to sit back and see grow! (Read: see it be better than yours).