games day: Alhambra, Age of Steam

[cellio]

We had another day of gaming a week ago (but I'm only getting around to writing about it now).

We were expecting a total of 11 people. Once we had a few, we started playing rounds of TransAmerica as a "summon players" game. It worked; after every round one more person showed up. :-) (TransAmerica is really short, which means new arrivals don't feel put out.)

When we had 10 people we split into two groups, knowing we could add the 11th to a game in progress, and choosing short-enough games that this wouldn't be a burden anyway. Well, we thought they were short games. Five of us played Alhambra, and the others played Carcassonne (I don't know which variations).

Two people had played Alhambra as a two-player game; it was completely new to the rest of us. This is a fun game; I'd like to play again. This is a combination of a tile game, card game, and German multiple-scoring-rounds-and-victory-points-are-what-matter game.

Each player is building a building (or courtyard, or garden, or something like that; all the text was in German), which consists of tiles. You start with one tile (your fountain), and you play additional tiles with the following restrictions: there must always be a path from your fountain to the new tile, and walls must match up. Tiles have 0-3 sides marked as walls, and a wall must back onto a wall (if it backs onto anything). Tiles come in six color-coded flavors; this matters for scoring.

Each tile has a purchase price printed on it. More-expensive tiles aren't better; they're just more expensive. At any given time only four (or fewer) tiles are available for purchase, so sometimes your decision is to buy an expensive one now or take your chances on a cheaper one later.

There are four currencies in the game. (On theme, these were dinari and three others that escape me; we just referred to them as gold, copper, green, and blue, becuase those were the symbol colors.) Tiles for purchase are randomly assigned to these currencies, and you can only spend the correct ucrrency to buy the tile. Money is represented by cards of the four colors with numbers ranging from 1 to 9 on them. To buy a tile you turn in cards of the right color totaling at least the price (no change is given).

On your turn you can take one of three actions. You can buy a tile and place it into your play area, or off in a buffer area if you can't or choose not to play it. If you pay with exact change you get another action, so there's some incentive there. Or, you can take money; there are always four money cards face up, and you can take any number of cards totaling 5 or lower, or any single card. Or, you can move a tile from your buffer onto your play area or from your play area into your buffer, or if you can do an exact position swap, you can do both.

There are three scoring rounds. The timing of the first two is determined randomly (how uncharacteristic!); the third is at the end of the game. Remember that I said there are six groups of tiles (color-coded)? In a scoring round, for each group, you count up the number (not prices) of tiles each player has in play (buffer doesn't count), and allocate points. Each color has its own point values; purples are just more valuable than browns. In the first scoring round you score only first place; in the second round first and second; and in the third, first through third. There's a cute twist (which we saw take effect several times): if there is a tie the players split the points for that position, and then you move down to the next position. Consider the case where first place is worth 12 points and second place is worth 5; if you have three people tied for first, that fourth person (in second place) gets more points than any of them. This might be a reason to pull a tile off your play area if you think scoring is imminent.

The other thing that's scored, each of those three times, is each player's longest wall. This was an important clue that I didn't appreciate until it was too late: I was trying to buy tiles with few walls so placement was not constrained, but the cost of that was fewer walls, and long walls are important. In a five-player game you might expect to get 10-15 points or so from tiles (I'm hand-waving here), but you could also have a wall that's 10-12 segments long. And walls, unlike first-place ranks in tile colors, can't be taken away from you.

This took a little longer to play than the 60-90 minutes we were expecting, but I think that was due to so many people learning the game. It's not a hard game but it's got some nuances to it. I enjoyed it.

After both games (and filler short games) were done (our 11th person had arrived and joined the other group during our game), we shuffled people around and chose longer games. The other group played Merchant of Venus, which I think was new to all players save the owner of the game. I enjoy that game (which I consider to be stylistically similar to the crayon rail games, though MoV has no crayons), but I wanted to learn Age of Steam, so I joined the other group. I think I had played this once before, but it had been a while. Dani was in a similar boat; I think he played a couple times, including at Origins. I think it was new to everyone else.

Age of Steam is a rail game. It uses tiles, not crayons, but you are building personal track, not global track like in the 18xx games. It is as much an economics game as a network-building game.

The board consists of a dozen or so cities and at least as many town sites (places where towns or cities might appear later), on a hex map. The hexes will over time be filled in with tiles showing track segments. On your turn, you can build track (which costs money) and move goods along your (and others', if you like) track between cities, to establish routes that bring you income each turn. (If you use others' track you share the income. This can still be worth it sometimes.) Goods are indicated by tokens that are placed on the cities at the start of the game and are first-come, first-served: once you move a particular good from its source to its destination, you have your trade route and the good is no longer available for anyone else. Goods are replenished slowly; which cities get replenished is random but you can look ahead to see which goods will be coming up next. If you're good at long-term planning, you should take that into account. (If you're not good at long-term planning, you will probably not win the game.)

Your starting train can only traverse one track segment per turn, which means routes that bring an income of 1. You will, therefore, want to upgrade your train over time. Trains have maintenance costs, though, so you have to balance this against your ability to generate more income. Building track also costs money. So does bidding for turn order each round, and you definitely want to go first at least some of the time. In order to get enough money cover all this, you have to issue bonds (to the bank, not to other players), which cost you interest forever. At the beginning of each turn you can issue more bonds. All of this leads to a pretty delicate balancing act: issue too many bonds and the interest will kill you, but if you don't issue enough you can't afford to build your network and thus generate income.

If I recall correctly, this game ran us about three hours. The other group had agreed to set a time limit on their game (this is supported, so it doesn't lead to an unsatisfactory game), so we were all able to finish around the same time and have dinner. Dinner was on the late side and a couple people had to leave soon after, so we ended up hanging out and talking rather than playing another round of games, which was just fine with me. (I'm not as hard-core as some of the other players.) This did mean, though, that once again a copy of Power Grid was present but went unplayed. (I've heard good things about the game and would like to play, one of these days.)

Comments

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

If you ever show up in the FedroSplat with spare time, I'll do my best to get folks together to play Power Grid with you. This especially applies if you're around on a Monday (ludus_gaming) or on a Friday when I'm in town (chez_turtle), but for visits we can be flexible.

(Yes, Power Grid can be played as a 2 player game, but it's more fun with more.)

[cellio]

I believe the person who brought Power Grid has only played it as a two-player game. He said he'd like to play it in a group. Maybe next time (of course, I said that last time too :-) ).