games day

[cellio]

We had some people over for gaming yesterday. (Alas, there was something I wanted to go to at my synagogue in the evening, but I didn't know the schedule until after we had committed to hosting.) Four other people played Descent, and I played a four-player game of Iron Dragon and two three-player games of Puerto Rico. After all that, some folks played Estimated Time to Invasion, which was new to either everyone or everyone but Dani. (He brought it home from Origins.)

According to BoardGameGeek, Descent is about a four-hour game. Either that's not correct or we're doing it wrong. The last game of it that we hosted ran about seven hours -- which wouldn't have been so bad if they hadn't started after dinner. Yesterday's game ran about seven and a half hours (plus another half-hour for setup; that game has a lot of stuff). At several points in the game, including some around the four-hour mark, the players collectively thought that they were moments away from finishing. In the end, the GM won, but the players put up a good fight.

I've played a couple of really short games of this -- short because the GM won fairly early, which was unsatisfying for all of us. I would be attracted to it as a four-hour game, but an eight-hour game of it does not appeal.

I wonder what's driving that. I do enjoy longer games, like Seven Ages and Civ, but for me specific games have specific good lengths. I enjoy EuroRails but would not want to play a EuroWorld on a huge map that took three times as long to end, either. Maybe there's some sort of magical "variety" threshold; Civ has a lot going on in it so it can be long, but Descent is a lot of the same stuff over and over so maybe that's just boring? I'm not sure. (And I should mention that I happily played in a multi-year D&D game not long ago, so it's not the millieu -- but RPGs have much more room for variety and this one had an intriguing story.)

Meanwhile, the four of us who weren't playing Descent played Iron Dragon, one of the crayon rail games. The three other players all started building in roughly the same area, competing with each other, while my initial cards pointed strongly toward the other side of the map. I got the orc as my initial foreman, so I made heavy use of the underground early on. (At one point I sailed to the northern hinterlands to make a high-priced delivery and then used that money to tunnel back to the mainland.)

I was not getting viable cards involving the eastern half of the board. I started building on spec (you have to connect the major cities anyway) and eventually got some good runs. However, when someone else won I was still pretty far behind. Oh well; it was a fun game even if I wasn't competitive.

After dinner, a couple departures, and an arrival, there were three people not playing Descent. Puerto Rico is supposed to work for three players, though I don't think I'd played that size game before. The games we played were fun but both unsatisfying in one way: they ended too early, both times due to running out of settlers. I understand that the game is supposed to end before you get to do everything you wanted to do; I'm used to that. This was earlier than that baseline. I am inclined to add a few more settlers to the pool in my next three-player game.

One possible contributor: the rules tell you how many settlers (and other game pieces) to use for different numbers of players. So we counted out 55 settlers, the number printed in the rulebook. Only today when I was looking for something else did I notice that the rules contain a diagram, showing a populated colony ship (three settlers in a three-player game) and a pile, with a line pointing to that and listing the different numbers. I wonder if that means we were supposed to start with 58. That would make a small difference, though I was thinking that the game needs 60-62. Hmm.

Descent finally ended and some folks decided to pull out ETI. I decided not to play this "one-hour game" (which ran two hours, but for a first time that's not surprising). It looked cute, and I'll play some other time. The idea is that each player is playing a government contractor trying to win research contracts, which are abundantly available because the alien invaders are on their way. Doing research is uncertain (based on card play), and players have to decide when to pull the trigger on going forward. Multiple companies can be working on the same project; first one to get there wins it and the other one is out of luck. Successful contracts can bring staff (helps with future projects), defense value (more if the program is secret), fame (more if the program is public), and probably other stuff. There are some other "stats" that the companies have that affect how well they do; it starts out with the standard "allocate N points to M traits" scheme so you have to make trade-offs.

The twist is that one of the players is secretly an alien collaborator, and at some point he pulls the trigger on the alien invasion. The invaders attack the other companies individually (that's where those defense numbers come in), and among those companies that survive, the one with the highest fame wins. Looks like fun.

Comments

[cellio]

Thanks for the info on the settlers. Ok, we shorted ourselves a bit.

I am probably more of a beginner than an intermediate player (probably played a dozen or so times). I tried to get an advantage in production and then favor the craftsman or captain. Toward that end, in both games early on I got the building that auto-populates plantations. (This gave me an advantage in settlers, so in the first game I bought the appropriate large building and was able to score it, which exactly made the difference in my winning.) I probably did choose mayor more than I should have, though, especially once the other two players snapped up the universities to auto-populate buildings.

I don't yet have a feel for what's actually good strategy, but this mostly seemed to work ok.