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games day
We ended up with 13 people, so we broke into three groups. One of the others played Iron Dragon; the other was finishing Ra when we finished our game, but I don't know if that's all they played. I was in the group playing Age of Imperialism, which we received as a gift earlier this year. Dani test-drove it last month with a few people, but I wasn't home for that. So this was my first time playing. (One of the other players had played once before.)
Age of Imperialism is sort of like Risk++. There is a map of most of the world (excluding the new world but including Austrailia), divided into territories. Territories are grouped into regions, as in Risk (but not the same divisions). There are scoring incentives for having every territory in a region.
Each player starts with a small number of territories (this varies by group size; for us it was five). These are chosen one at a time. The rest of the territories get two hidden tokens, one representing the resources the space has and one representing the strength of the natives. You also get some starting money.
You can use money to buy military units of various flavors, explorers, engineers, and structures (cities, factories, schools, etc). Most of the structures give you income each round, which you spend to buy more units and structures.
You can send an explorer into an unclaimed territory, at which point you find out how strong the natives are. The explorer might be able to persuade them to join you peacefully; this is a die roll that becomes harder as the natives get stronger. If that succeeds, great -- and then you find out if there's a resource (which also increases your income). In our game about a quarter of the spaces ended up having resources. (The rest of the tokens are blank.) If the explorer fails he dies and you can either send another explorer or resort to military might.
I had a slow start in the game due to some tough natives and some unlucky rolls. I also made some poor choices about placement of structures, but I think I needed to play once before developing the insight that would let me realize that. Two of the other players became powerful fairly quickly but did not immediately attack each other; one was in Africa and one was in eastern Asia, so they had to develop ships first. (Ships come from ports, which is a kind of structure you can build.)
There are four different types of military units. They don't have special powers (in the standard game; there's also an advanced game), but you get bonuses on your attack for having variety in your army. The combat system is pretty straightforward; each side rolls dice and adds bonuses and the winner chooses a unit on the loser's side to kill. Iterate until done; there is no retreating once the fight has started. Mostly this seemed to work, but there were places where we found this system a little unsatisfying. On the other hand, I'm not yet ready to play a version where the different units have different attack strengths.
The physical aspects of the game appear to have been developed by artists rather than engineers -- so the map is very pretty but it can be hard to see borders, and the little plastic pieces are nicely done but sometimes too similar to each other to make for easy recognition across the table. A map with solid colors and thick black lines, and chits clearly saying things like "cavalry" and "leader", would be more functional but also more ugly. I fear that the board-game industry as a whole is moving in the direction of beauty over function. This is a little rough on the bifocal crowd.
The rules suggest playing to a time limit if you don't want to play to last man standing. We decided to end when the other two groups finished their games. When we finished, two players had been nearly wiped out, I was just starting to really take off, and the other two players were about to fight each other. I don't think they would have weakened each other enough to help me much; if we had played it out I think I would have ended in either second (if lucky) or third (otherwise) place. I think it would have taken another couple of hours to do that.
I enjoyed the game and will happily play again, despite the art.
After dinner some people decided to play Age of Renaissance, which I've played a few times before. It's similar to Civilization in a lot of ways. It's a fun game, but one of the ways it's similar to Civ is in length, and I wasn't up for it. I wasn't the only one, so the rest of us split into two groups to play shorter games. I played Settlers of Catan (and actually won, which rarely happens) and then a couple games of Trans America (a fun, fast, train game).
Age of Renaissance consists of three ages (or epochs, or whatever). They were about to enter the third one about half an hour ago, so I suspect they'll be at this for another hour or so.
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Are you aware that Rio will be releasing TransEuropa (http://www.riograndegames.com/games/rio273.html) (Transamerica in Europe) later this month?
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Have you played Power Grid yet? Our gaming group has played it several times recently. I actually won last Monday night!
We should get you guys to come down to TCEP 12 (http://www.livejournal.com/users/grayhawkfh/89589.html) on Labor Day weekend... the more the merrier!
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I did manage to place my starting settlements so as to have access to all five resources (that usually doesn't work out, especially if you go first and thus also go last). There wasn't a lot of expansion room, though; I got cut off by other players. Ultimately I won with four cities, one settlement (built on the edge of the desert), and a victory point.
Have you played Power Grid yet?
I haven't even heard of Power Grid yet. What is it?
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I *STRONGLY* recommend you go to the BoardGameGeek site for this game (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/2651) if you do pick up a copy. It's got useful printouts to hand out to players. And I do recommend that your group give it a try if you can... the strategy game fen in our group seem to like it quite a bit.