gaming day

[cellio]

This weekend alaricmacconnal and Kathy hosted a day of gaming. I got to play two new-to-me games (along with others), Through the Ages (board game) and Innovation (card game).

Through the Ages is a civilization-building game. There is no map and no direct world-conquest; you are competing with the other civilizations to gain scarce resources (cards) and build improvements and wonders -- while also producing enough building materials for all that and also keeping your people fed and happy and productive. And having at least a bit of an army for defensive purposes is a good idea, even if you never go on the offensive. Different advances, wonders, and leaders convey special advantages, but in the end, the game is won by the amount of cultural development you've managed to produce.

There are apparently a few different configurations of the game. We played a shorter game (leaving out the last of four ages) but with advanced rules (meaning the military options were included). Dani played this at Origins with the basic rules and it sounded like the game was not very interactive; I've only played it the once but I think the game would be a lot weaker without that aspect. We had very little aggression in our game, but the possibility of it happening made a difference.

The basic mechanism is card purchase followed by meeting the conditions on the card to play it. On your turn you have a number of actions -- depending on your form of government and perhaps other factors -- that you can spend to buy cards, play cards, deploy workers to various tasks, build wonders, and a few other things. At the beginning of your turn there are (in a four-player game) about a dozen cards available for purchase; the first third cost one action, the second third cost two actions, and the last third cost three actions. So if a good card comes out you can pay extra to grab it or hope it's still available on your turn. At the end of your turn the card in the first position is removed (unless you bought it) and all remaining cards slide down. (This mechanism is evocative of Vinci.)

This gets the card into your hand. You play cards from your hand by expending science points, which you acquired from the labs you have in play. You start the game with one lab that produces one point of science per turn; you can increase your output by either adding more workers to that lab or building better labs (or both). Early in the game I under-estimated the importance of science and had to catch up later; the costs to deploy cards go up as you move through the ages.

You also start the game with one farm and one mine, producing one food and one building resource respectively. You need to spend food to deploy workers, and more food as you get more workers on the board, so that's important. And you need building resources to build labs and more farms and mines and wonders and so on, so that's important. And if you have too many workers they start getting unhappy, which is bad, so you need to build temples because religion makes people happy, so that's important. And you need at least a bit of an army in case the other players notice how weak you are, so that's important. And somewhere in there you really want to advance your government from despotism because monarchies and republics and others get more actions per turn, so that's important (but expensive). And... you get the idea; there's a balancing act.

Our game, with teaching (two completely-new players and Dani), took about four hours. The box says four hours; I expect that the time spent teaching would trade off reasonably for the time to play the last age if the players already knew the game. So this is a faster civilization-style game than Advanced Civ or Age of Renaissance or (cough) Seven Ages, but it is also limited to four players.

This game has a lot of parts -- cards in various ages, different kinds of counters, military cards that are also sorted by age, and other stuff -- but, unusually for board games with lots of parts, the packaging helps. There were bins in the plastic molding for each type of card, and a place to put bags of the other pieces, and in general it was not a pain to either set up or clean up. (I don't know if the muslin-like bags we used came with the game or were added by the owner, but Ziplocs would work fine.)

I enjoyed this game and would like to play again. I suspect we'll buy a copy.

The other new game was a quick little card game (30 minutes or so) called Innovation. This game also supports up to four players, though there's an expansion that I'm told lets you add one more. This is a light, ever-changing game reminiscent of Fluxx (without all the rules changes); I was surprised to see that BoardGameGeek lists it as a strategy game. My experience was that any strategy I started to form on one of my turns was ancient history by my next turn, so I found myself playing "in the moment" and thought that's how it was supposed to work.

This is a card game where you are competing for "achievement" points. You get achievements either by satisfying certain conditions with your cards in play (kind of rare), or by accumulating "score" points that you use to buy achievements (the more common path from what I saw). On your turn you can take two actions from the following set: draw a card, play a card, or activate a card, meaning follow the special instructions on that card. The action and variability come in these activations, which can produce effects ranging from adding to your score pile to stealing cards from other people to re-arranging the cards in play to drawing and immediately playing new cards. And probably more; those are the types I remember.

The cards are divided into five colors and you can only have one card per color active at a time. So if you play -- or are forced to play -- a new one, it goes down on top of the one you already had, and the action on the previous card is no longer available to you (unless some other action lets you remove the new card or re-arrange the stack). Cards have symbols on them and the number of a given symbol that you have showing matters in evaluating actions. For example, an action will have a symbol associated with it (say, a coin); when you announce that action then anybody who has as many coins showing as you also gets to do it. Alternatively, if the action is a demand (a requirement that another player do something), it only applies to people who have fewer of that symbol than you do. So before you take an action you want to look around the table to see who else will benefit from it or be hurt by it, but you have to look every time because the cards in play are always changing.

The game is called "Innovation" because the cards represent scientific advances, ranging over time from things like writing to things like fission. But the theme could really be anything and still use the same mechanics; it's just window-dressing. I didn't notice a strong relationship between the advances and their associated actions, though I only played twice and haven't read through all the cards.

My one criticism of the game is the gratuitous use of odd vocabulary. When we were starting to set up I looked at the player "cheat sheet" and was immediately confused, with options including "meld" and "dogma" and "splay". "Meld" means play a card and "dogma" means do an action on a card; why couldn't they say "play" and "activate"? This isn't just on the cheat sheet; that vocabulary runs through all the card text. Similarly, you don't win by "score"; you win by "achievements", with "score" only helping you to buy "achievements". They could have made that less confusing.

I would enjoy playing again but probably wouldn't buy it.

Comments

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

Innovation stuff... since we've played it a fair bit at Ludus:

The trouble with "play" is that it can mean both "lay the card on the table" and "perform the actions on the card". "Activate" does mean the latter, but I've never heard it used in a card game before.

"Meld" is actually an old-time cardgame term meaning put a card, or set of cards, on the table in front of you. I'd encountered the term when learning various games from my grandparents (e.g. pinochle, and rummy/canasta variants) but I can imagine it might confuse folks. We also use "deploy" for this action but not as frequently.

"Dogma", OTOH, is just weird and we hardly ever use it when playing Innovation. We tend to use "invoke" for that, or "fire", particularly when a person's two actions on that turn are to "deploy and fire" the same card.

We tend to use the term "point score" instead of just "score" but I don't know if that makes it any less confusing for most folks.

You *can* win "on points" under certain conditions. The game gets very entertainingly chaotic if you actually start deploying and firing the "10" cards; it's instructive to read the 8's, 9's, and 10's between games.

[cellio]

Thanks for the comment. I hadn't heard "meld" before, though I never did learn pinochle from my grandmother. :-) (I did learn rummy and a trick-taking game called only "500" from my parents, though.)

In the context of a card game it seems obvious to me that "play" means "put a card into play", but now that you mention it is also seems reasonable that it could be understood as "use this card's special action". So if that's ambiguous I think I'd say "deploy" and "activate", though I do like "fire" in this case.