new games

[cellio]

This weekend we invited a few people over to help test-drive some new games. (Well, new to me; Dani played each once at Origins and liked them enough to bring home copies.)

The first four of us began a "summon players" game while waiting for the other two. Or at least that's what we thought we were doing. The canonical "summon players" game is short (target 15 minutes), lightweight, and not something anyone will be heavily invested in (nor upset if we just abort). Our usual game for this is Trans America, but this time we pulled out Dominion. It turned out to be closer to an hour than the advertised half-hour, but some of that was setup and teaching. We did finish the game at the urging of the final two players.

Dominion has the feel of collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering, but it's much lighter-weight. Essentially, you build your deck over the course of the game, trying to buy action cards that will bring you money with which you can ultimately buy victory points. (You can buy victory points at any time, but you want to keep them from dilluting your deck early in the game, so you have to judge the right time to switch tactics.) The basic game has 25 different action cards, 10 of which will be included in any given game. They suggest some combinations to play with, and I"m inclined to do that rather than just randomize because the cards do interact with each other (sometimes).

This game has "expansion sets" written all over it, and I think it's likely to suffer from the same problems as Cosmic Encounters and Magic. There are only so many variations of a special power or monster or spell or whatever that fit in a coherent system; both of these games exceeded that limit by orders of magnitude. So I would enjoy playing Dominion again, but I am likely to resist playing with any expansion sets at all for quite some time, until I'm convinced that the base game isn't rich enough.

Next we moved on to Imperial, which Dani described as a cross between Diplomacy and 1830. I don't like Diplomacy, but I enjoyed Imperial a lot. The players are all investors in six countries in pre-WW1 Europe. When the game starts everyone is "playing" one of these countries, but to succeed in the game you really have to stop thinking of yourself as "Britain" (for example); you are "dominant investor in Britain, midling investor in Russia, and minor investor in Italy" (or whatever). Whoever has the most bonds for a country plays it, but when ownership changes hands so does control. At one point we had a player who did not dominate any country, but she was still in the game (and regained a controlling position later).

Your score is computed by, for each country you're invested in, multiplying the size of your stake by the country's position on a scoring track, which in turn is tied to tax income. I won this game by, in the last turn, buying the dominant position of the country that was leading on the scoring track while also having the dominant position in the second-place country (which had been first place until that turn). In other words, the previous owner did most of the work of advancing it, and then I swooped in with a fistful of cash to reap the benefits. Just like in the real world. :-)

A country's play consists of choosing an action from a short and dynamic list of options, including building factories/shipyards, using those resources to build military units, maneuvering those units, paying out investors, taxation (to raise funds and advance your score), and a couple others. During taxation you gain income for each factory or shipyard plus each sea or "neutral" space you control (examples of the latter are north Africa, Turkey, and Scandanavia). But you reduce that income for each unit you have on the board, so you're looking for a balance point. We had a couple battles that were described as "tax prep".

Conflict is very straightforward and there is no randomness to it. You also only fight if one of the parties wants to, so if you agree, you can both share a space. This mostly came up with seas, since, in addition to being a controlled space, a sea gives your land units access to lands across the sea.

I forgot to time our game, but I think we had played for about three hours when one of the players had to leave, at which point I think we were within a turn or so of when it would have ended anyway. BGG says two hours and I'm not sure I believe that, but thinking of it as a three-hour game is safe, I think.

Next we played Hermagor, which is a resource-optimization game with more wiggle room than many in this space. There is a map with roads and towns, where each town is interested in buying one of eight commodities. A somewhat-complex bidding process determines which commodities you have available to sell each turn. In each turn you will have between three and five moves; on a move you pay to travel each road segment (some are cheaper than others) until you get to one town you haven't been to before where you can sell a good, for which you collect income. It's not quite the travelling-salesman problem because you're allowed to pass through towns you've visited; you just can't sell twice to the same place.

When you sell in a town you leave a marker (your trading post), which can be a minor source of income. If you have trading posts at all the towns bordering a region (this tends to mean four or five posts), you get special access to one type of good. This doesn't help you with selling; this just contributes to victory points (and brings you a little cash). Encircling regions with different commodity affiliations helps; doing the same good twice deosn't really. Of course, you have limited resources (there are more towns than you can visit). And to encourage geographic diversity, a component of your score is based on the number of trading posts you have in the map zone in which you have the fewest. (There are three zones and at the end of the game I had five, five, and six, the best that could be done.)

I think this game ran about two hours. Again, some of that was teaching; as with the other games, only one person had played before.

After dinner we were down to four players so went back to Dominion. Each of two games ran close to an hour; each of these was a different variation, so there were new cards to learn each time. Of the three variations played, the first (the recommended first one to try) was the most satisfying. But more experimentation is called for.

I would happily play any of these three games again, and would actively like to play more Imperial and Hermagor.

Comments

[mrpeck.livejournal.com]

Imperial sounds like a pretty interesting game.