Fri Nite Gaming @ OTK Cheras 3rd October 08, Agricola, Age of Empires III, Through the Ages
Ξ October 5th, 2008 | → | ∇ Boardgames |
Arrived late to find the gang already started with Agricola with keealvin looking on.
Yes, farming mania continues and surprisingly the farms are quite ‘derelic’ looking, lacking fields and having minimal pastures. I think the fact that the ’seasoned’ gamer jack208 having SIX stone rooms skewed blownfreaks and blownfreaks’ wife to follow suit.
jack208’s farm. SIX stone houses (for combo with the chief) and a large pasture done only on the 2nd final turn!
blownfreaks’ wife’s farm. lots of animal without the means (fireplace) to cook them!
blownfreaks’ farm. even the yeoman farmer can’t save this sparse farm.
Seeing as how the gamers enjoyed Agricola, we brought out another game with the worker placement mechanic - Age of Empires III. Rules explanation went over quickly and the five of us went about the task of settling the new world. blownfreaks and wife got the concept quickly and wisely took capital buildings that provides additional specialists each turn. jack208 and myself traded blows on each other as we wisely summarised that both of us ’seasoned’ gamers are the biggest threat.
jack208’s privateers went about terrorising the colonist about the spanish main while my soldiers picked ooff rival colonists from newfoundland. blownfreaks invested in the West Indies Co. while blownfreaks’ wife went about converting natives with her faithful missionaries. keealvin sent his abundance of immigrant colonists to the new world. All in all a great game that went over well.
After that we retreated to blownfreaks’ place to do Through the Ages in a quieter setting. I offered to do the Simple game first before advancing to the Advanced game but upon jack208’s insistence, went straight into Advanced. The added complexity of your civilisation’s Happinessand Corruption added a layer of complexity to the game that prolonged analysis time and had an effect of delaying an unsuspecting civilisation’s progress.
For example, during one turn I produced too much food and resources, causing myself to lose two resources to corruption. Since I was building a wonder at the time, the lost resources screwed up my resource allocation, causing delays to the mega project. I had to practically reduce my food production to reduce corruption. One thematic way to look at this mechanic is that there’s too much food production and some of it was lost to smugglers and corrupt officials.
Another addition that does wonders to the game is the political action round where Aggression, Pacts and Events can be played. This round typically rewards the civilisation that has the stronger military strength. There are defense cards to help out the weak but the stronger civilisation can just pound out their Aggressions continuously and exhaust the opponents’ defense cards. Stronger civilisations also typically draw more military cards so they have the better chances of getting medieval on the weaklings. However the battle mechanics are skewed towards the defenders so a weaker civilisation can still fend off attacks without much trouble provided it is not lagging too far behind in military strength.
The constant need to balance population, resource, technology, culture, corruption, happiness and military drives this game forward and also grinds the turns down. It is really really difficult to do well in everything.
There were some rules played wrongly in our game particularly for newbies jack208 and blownfreaks as there are many different sets of rules governing the myriad cards.
In particular:
1. Drawing the 2nd leader from the same age (you are allowed to only have one leader from each age, whether played or in hand)
2. Urban building limit not adhere to (you are allowed to have as many urban buildings as the limit shown on the government card)
3. Costs of drawing a wonder card (civil action points costs increases for each wonder already completed)
4. Political cards are played before taking civil actions (we always played after when we realise we haven’t used the cards in our hands before card draw)
Some rules which were messed up by yours truly:
1. Only ONE tactics card in play at a time. We played that there’s no limit.
2. Score culture point = age of event card played. This would have made the military option more enticing by encouraging players to play events.
Another good session and the game gets even better. Hope to have all the rules locked up tight for the next game.
on October 7th, 2008 at 1:21 am
Omg the farms! i longed for the farms!