OTK Cheras 23 May 08
Ξ May 24th, 2008 | → | ∇ Boardgames |
Arrived 9pm to find rhyen teaching john, ceternal and shrapnel Mystery of the Abbey. Since phuah and myself knew the rules, we just jumped right in. A fairly friendly game, all of us shared information unreservedly. By the end of the first round, we have eliminated the Franciscans from the suspect list, a bunch of holy do-gooders.
Round 2 saw some scrambling for a cohesive process of elimination as the suspect cards began to move around. Information tracking became hard, but the narrowing down of suspects continues, albeit at a slower pace.
Round 3 saw some reckless questioning as the questions became more and more direct, to the point of asking whether a certain priest was being eliminated as a suspect, to the delight of all involved. This, of course is a bad move, as it allows other people to capitalise on the information.
Round 4 saw rampant accusations flying as it becomes harder and harder to eliminate suspects. Two innocent priest were fingered before rhyen finally accused the correct murderous father.
General impression was that the game take too long and the process of elimination bogged down towards the end. There were many a happy faces as the game end. Verdict: Mystery of the Abbey does not gel with 6 player. probably 3 or 4 is best.
Meanwhile at the next table, cmun and her gang of FHMs have arrived and started a game of That’s Life!. This is lostboyz’s favourite game as evidenced by his participation. jack208 and waiyan also arrived at this point and had a cuppa while waiting for the present games to finish.
After Mystery of the Abbey, table #1 moved to Race for the Galaxy, as instigated by the arrival of Sith Lord darth aa-nemesis. A few games was played while rhyen attempts to decipher the rules of 1870 on the spot. aanemesis and myself grabbed some victories each while ceternal struggled to emulate his 64-points feat. phuah got creamed as his military theory founded 2 weeks ago was shot to pieces.
Table #2 by now had moved on to Carcassonne and this is also lostboyz’s favourite game as evidenced by his continuous involvement. shrapnel also joined in at this point to observe. Later, cmun’s galpals bid adieu and a newly opened Cafe International was played between cmun, lostboyz, rhyen and jack208, not sure if shrapnel joined or not.
After Cafe International was done, rhyen and jack208 came over to table#1 and gave some pressure to aanemesis and ceternal to move on. And so they did move on to play 2-player Race for the Galaxy while rhyen, jack208, phuah and myself setup 1870.
The two Race crack addicts dropped by once a while to poke fun at the 1870 players every 15minutes or so, giving a running commentary of the game progress:
“still explaining rules ah?”
“still bidding for privates?”
“first stock round ah?”
“i see the first line of railroads on the board!”
…
yes well, for the 3 hours it takes for 1870 to reach the mid-game, aanemesis and ceternal probably played like 12 games of Races already. Then as table #2 gradually left, table #1 continued until the wee hours of the morning. I made a mistake this round of not ordering coffee and paid the price as my caffeine-starved brain struggle to compute the best route.
jack208 meanwhile took it like any other 18xx game and execute his ‘in-famous’ train shuffle tech. rhyen caught on too late to float his 2nd company while phuah steadfastly refused to start another. jack208 was then forced to take on a 3rd company to force the train rush.
Initial impressions is that the train rush is slower in coming. Perhaps we weren’t familiar with the ropes yet and started companies later than expected. Since the companies starts with 100% capital after 60% of the shares are subscribed, there’s no further incentive for more capital injection to be made into the companies. Player’s cash should then be used to startup new companies and I believe this can be done much sooner than what transpired in our game.
Furthermore, there were not a lot of share poaching in our game (buy at par and sell at current market value for a quick profit). Since unsold IPO shares will earn companies dividends, there is an incentive to poach the bonds and junk it to the market immediately.
There is also an element of share protection and share revaluation, but since poaching was not done often enough, this part of the game was not explored thoroughly.
The share protection mechanism (as read by us) allows a player to go above the 60% limit on the company ownership, as exercised by rhyen. But the cost in doing so would be the startup of a new company and the subsequent flexibility in shuffling trains and influencing the train rush.
Train qty limits are a constraint on the train rush sequence and if all companies’ train qty limits are maxed out, the onus is on the player owning the lowest level of trains to startup a new company and drive the train rush forward. This is one of the subtleties in this game.
The tiles mix are quite generous and we did not experience too much ‘incompetent engineer’ syndrome. However, like jack208 pointed out, perhaps the players weren’t familiar enough yet. There exists choke points on the board but there is quite often an easy way to bypass them as the board has a wide-open feel to it.
As mentioned, there are still aspects of the gme left unexplored, like the shares poaching, protection and revaluation, so can’t wait to get this game back to the table again.
After the game, rhyen opened to show his 18EU beautiful mounted boards and mounted tokens. The quality of the components are nice, typical of the high end of the deepthoughtgames line, but the map was a let down after the initial hype by jack208, as i thought it was fairly typical. However, the large number of minor companies in the game look nasty as is the crowded nature of the board. Soon perhaps we can play this game?