games day

[cellio]

Our friend Pam invited the usual gaming suspects to her new house today. Dani and I brought her a house-warming gift -- Iron Dragon. (Hey, we're gamers; of course we'll get a game for the new homeowner who'd like to host game days but doesn't own a lot of games herself.) She really likes that class of train games, so she was pleased. (We didn't break it out today, though.)

Dani's rule of gaming days: no matter what you plan, you will end up with seven players. Seven is pretty much the pesimal number for the games we tend to play, unless you want to commit all day and evening to a single game. If anyone has recommendations for games that play well for seven players in about three hours (two is fine too), I'd love to hear 'em. (We actually started the day with eight players, allowing us to split into two groups of four, but one player had to leave after dinner.)

I played three different games and learned one other:

Trans America is a fun, fast little train game played on a loose approximation of a map of the US. The country is divided into five regions, and you are randomly assigned one city in each region. You are trying to build track to connect all your cities. There is no notion of "owned" track, though you can only build track that connects to a marker you place at the beginning of the game. So you tend to end up with small bits of track eventually merging into a large network. Once we got the hang of it we were playing five-player games in about 20 minutes, so this works well as a fill-in while waiting for the other group to finish a game so you can redistribute people.

Circvs Maximus is a game of chariot racing a la Ben Hur. You build your chariot by distributing four points among four categories (max two per): driver skill, chariot type (light/medium/heavy), starting speed, and endurance. Chariots can slam into other chariots (and/or the horses pulling them); that's where chariot type comes in. Some maneuvers require you to burn endurance points (a non-renewable resource), as does whipping your horse for higher speed (or having someone else whip your horse on the way by). Damage to your horses slows you down; damage to your chariot forces you to make checks (die rolls) before certain maneuvers (or before moving too quickly) to see if your chariot flips. (If that happens, your chariot becomes airborne -- we almost saw one land on another chariot -- and your driver is now being pulled along the ground by the horses, taking damage each turn.) Victory condition is a live driver being pulled by at least one horse across the finish line (chariot technically optional, but advised). I had a lot of fun with this one, particularly in the game where we each ran two cooperating chariots. I ended up winning (by a nose) in a game where I put two points into initial speed and two into endurance, and whipped the horse almost every turn. This was the "run like a bat out of hell" strategy, but I got attacked a few times and some very lucky die rolls kept me from flipping in the endgame.

I saw but didn't play a quick little unnamed card game (supposedly Japanese). It's sort of a logic puzzle. Take ace through ten of two different suits (one red, one black); these 20 cards form your deck. Each of two players is dealt four cards, which he must place in numeric order (red wins ties), face down. On your turn, you draw a card from the deck, look at it, and then use it to "attack" one of your opponent's face-down cards, choosing a card and gussing its numeric value. If you're right, your opponent turns that card up and you can either attack again or take the card and add it, face down, to your own field (in proper position). If your guess is wrong, you must place the card face up in your field. Game ends when one person's cards have all been revealed.

I also played Puerto Rico. None of us had played it a lot, and one person was playing for the first time, but it went pretty smoothly. (Lost by three points, darn it.)

While four of us were playing Puerto Rico the other three opted for "a quick game of Titan". I keep telling Dani that that trick never works. :-) One player got knocked out after about an hour (so for him it was a quick game, I guess); the other two played for a while longer and then decided it would take too long to play out and Titan isn't all that interesting with just two players. Dani actually owns a game board for Titan that's set up for just two players (Johan made it for him), but I don't know if he's ever played on it. (I think the idea was that this board would lure me into playing two-player games with him.)

Other games in play were McMulty and Ra. I like McMulty but wanted to play new-to-me games. I'm not a big fan of Ra, though I've only played once and maybe I just haven't given it a fair chance.

Comments

[mikekn]

If you want to try something a little different for seven players, there is always Astronomical Tables. jducoeur has been teaching it for a while now, and it's caught on big in my area. Of course, you'll need to make a board first.

[cellio]

Thanks for the pointer! That does look interesting. And now that you mention it, jducoeur has mentioned that a few times in his journal; I just failed to make the "7 players" connection.

[jducoeur]

Yaas -- it's the only good period game I know (indeed, one of very few games at all) that is optimized for seven players. A relatively fast, brutal backgammon variant, although endgame can take a while. Highly social and rather amusing. You do have to make your own set, though -- while it's gradually spreading, there aren't any commercial sets out there yet. (Although, fortunately, there are now commercial vendors of seven-sided dice, which are the hard part.)

Actually, though, the first game that came to my mind was Poker. Seven players is the max for most of the *interesting* Poker variants (not the annoying Hold-em stuff, but real games in the Seven Stud family -- yes, I'm a Poker Bigot), and IMO generally the best number for any Poker table. Our Poker table intentionally aimed to get seven players when we could...

[dagonell.livejournal.com]

Love the new icon!
-- Dagonell

[cellio]

cahwyguy made it for me and did a great job!