Bukit Apek Redux
Ξ November 23rd, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Hiking |
Returned to Bukit Apek today. Instead of going down to the waterfall, we went to the Bukit Saga summit. Much more gentler course and has this at the top:
OTK 21st Nov 08
Ξ November 22nd, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Boardgames |
Arrived at 8.45pm to find han already arrived and waiting with his brand new Dominion game. blownfreaks and wife arrived shortly thereafter to start a 3-player Dominion game with han while i ate my dinner.
yeeling, blownfreaks and han playing Dominion.
Dominion is an interesting deck building game where the basic rules are very simple and the complexity comes in from the individual cards that may be added to each player’s deck. This game was described as a CCG (Collectable Card Game) stripped down to its very fundamentals in the Boardgames-To-Go podcast and I find that description very apt. This probably meant that jack208 will find little to like in this game.
In Dominion, each player plays with their own deck of cards, but those cards are obtained from a common pool. The various cards available in other CCGs are stripped down to only three types of cards in this game:-
treasure (money)
victory points, and
action cards.
Treasure (money) cards are used to buy more cards, Victory Point cards are counted during the end game scoring but otherwise sits uselessly in your hand, while the Action cards are used to build an economic engine to maximise Victory Points card purchase.
Each turn, the action sequences are simple:-
1) play an action card
2) buy a card
3) discard all unused cards in hand
4) draw back to 5 cards
Using this simple 4 steps and 3 types of cards, the players can start playing!
The trick here, like other CCGs, is that the meat of the game is in the game-breaking abilities on the cards and in this game’s case, the Action cards. There are 25 ( i think) Action cards that comes in the set and only 10 are used at any one time. The idea of course is to limit the learning of new rules to only 10 cards per game. The various card combinations available also cater for different gaming tastes/flavour. Some combinations encourage solitaire-efficiency engine building while others are more confrontational in nature.
I think someone even calculated that if the 10 out of 25 cards are chosen randomly, there are about a million worth of different combinations to explore. Of course I doubt that that’s the case as I think some of the cards won’t go well together.
trash pile - important to thin down your deck in order to draw other more important cards.
Dominion comes with 500 cards!
First game saw some efficiency deck engine gaming while I joined in the 2nd game which saw much confrontation and interaction due to the different action sets that were used. Overall 2 thumbs up and thanks to han for bringing it and teaching it to us.
After that we moved to Hamburgum and this being the 3rd game in the rondel series by Mac Gerdts, expectation was somewhat high. Players are church builders in the city of Hamburg, trading beer, sugar and clothes for wood, bricks and bells to make churches. That is the basic premise of the game and there are also some incidental building of the city of Hamburg to powre up the players’ church building engine.
The classic hallmark of a rondel game is that there is no luck in the game and every action of every player on the rondel is instrumental in leading the player down their chosen strategy path. This is why rondel games sometimes take 2 hours to play despite the simplicity of an action per turn. However, in Hamburgum, this choice is somewhat diluted by the fact that there is no discernable difference in choosing to specialise in beer, clothes or sugar for trading and the various churches built in the game have no major bearing on the different strategies either. Simply put, there were no nail-biting interactions and closely watched moves as players take move after move that does not seem to overly affect others’ strategy
The pros of this consequence is that we have now a rondel game that plays in an hour. The cons is that there are not much tension present in the game. Perhaps the strategies are not so apparent that the pursuit of various victory conditions are not tense and closely watched upon. Unlike Antike’s early technology rush and Imperial’s early tax performance bonus rush, there was no such rush for the players to complete the various churches.
Perhaps there is an ‘a-ha’ moment that have not struck the players yet, but the game as of now remains as an uninspired exercise in resource shifting. More plays are required before the final conclusion though.
blownfreaks and han contemplating their moves. the game goes very fast due to the simplicity of the actions AND the apparent lack of tension in player choices.
chunky wooden bits a plenty in this game. me (red) ahead in the end, but I still cannot figure out what strategies I took to win!
After a puzzling Hamburgum experience, we adjourned to blownfreaks’ place for round 2 of gaming. Yeeling did not join us as she was tired but the three of us played next with blownfreaks’ Stone Age. This was the first play for han and myself and I find the game strangely satisfying.
Probably because I won the game and that the dice weren’t too brutal to me as in the case of a TI3 game. I went with a wood-card strategy and it paid off handsomely as I finished comfortably ahead of han and blownfreaks. I dubbed my strategy as the ‘woodcutter’ strategy as it entails camping out the cards early and paying for the cards with the cheapest resource available - wood.
There is also a mis-evaluation of the victory point potential of the cards as the more you collect, the more points it is worth. The cards also sometimes have bonuses on them to offset the resources you have to pay to get them. The huts victory points on the other hand although easily calculated, works out to be less efficient as they often require hard to get resources.
very colourful and attractive board. the mechanics are a very simplistic Pillars of the Earth game crossed with Agricola. I won’t mind playing this game again but expect to see more competition for the cards next time.
The last game we played was Formula De, and on the Monaco track. One of han’s car took a gamble early on and was left limping all the way back to the finishing line while the other managed to finish 2nd. blownfreaks did conservatively and had both his cars finishing 3rd and 4th. My cars were both ahead at the halfway point (me experienced mah…) but at the last corner, one of my cars was given a tap on the behind bumper and it crashed out! Winner was then han and blownfreaks tied with 7 points while my sole 1st placer gained me only 6 points.
Gaming then ended at 3am due to tiredness. Thanks for those who made it to this gaming session.
Agricola @ Mage Cafe 12 Nov 08
Ξ November 12th, 2008 | → 2 Comments | ∇ Boardgames |
It is telling when a boardgame like Agricola hits the table always instead of new games like Hamburgum and Through the Ages. It is so good that it satisfies any gaming desires.
Sharks like aanemesis, rob and wong played this game so often at Mage Cafe that I doubt anyone in Malaysia can best them. As far as I can tell, their record plays are ’several’ times a week.
A 3-p game with rob and aanemesis in which I got creamed. Food production was hard and resources were scarce for me. A tougher game than 5-p.
rob & aanemesis, Agricola ’sharks’ of Mage Cafe dissecting game moves.
2nd game with wong joining in. The biggest shark of them all steamrolled over all competition.
Mage Cafe seemed to be hitting a stride with its business model. Weekday nights still see a multitude of students/gamers playing boardgames there. Tables behind rob were playing Tomb and Gloom.
Gamers on sofas doing Citadels. Mage Cafe is here to stay. While aanemesis and myself left after the 2nd game, rob and wong played the 3rd game of Agricola with Tracey. I shudder to think of their playing frequency…
Some Updates on My Activities
Ξ November 9th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Hiking, Uncategorized |
I’ve been Terry Fox-runnin’:
Watching the Mage Cafe Cat:
Trekking up Bukit Apek/Cuepacs:
OTK 7 Nov 08
Ξ November 9th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Boardgames |
Another good session last night (when was it ever bad?) that saw the return of a familiar face and a plethora of new games.
I arrived at OTK at 7.30pm to find the long lost Datuk Lostboyz waiting. Really good to see a familiar face as we launched into a range to topics like the current economy and geek stuff like Fallout 3.
It was 8.30pm before our great and august organiser jack208 arrived with his bag of goodies from Australia. Some hard to find titles and bargains were purchased from Aussie to help bolster the range of boardgaming options in Cheras.
Shortly after, waiyan, isabel, blownfreaks and wife joined us to start a new game. blownfreaks brought his brand new Chinatown and proceeded to teach us. Very simple euro, the trading aspect is like the full out chaos of Wealth of Nations. The returns on the trading items follows an increasing scale depending on the completeness of the set collection. There is also a spatial aspect in that the set collected have to be place on the board adjacent to each other to have the full on effect.
Overall a straightforward game and lots of laughter were heard as blownfreaks & wife, isabel, waiyan and lostboyz barter furiously with each other while jack208 watched on.
Meanwhile on the other table, patomas, wonglc and wolfx arrived to join me in a game of Taluva. Now this goodie set belonged to wolfx and it is still fun to play. Lots of brain burning and analysis abound as wonglc and patomas tried to make sense of the subtle devious moves by veterans wolfx and myself.
We played two games of this and while myself took the first game from under wolfx, patomas won the second one as wolfx and myself were busy throwing a !hut! into each other’s plans. Crazy cool components, lostboyz even commented that the tiles are thick enough to be thrown as shurikens.
While the other table winded down and left jack208, blownwfreaks & wife to get through a grueling time In The Year of The Dragon, patomas, wolfx, wonglc and myself continued on with Chinatown. This time, there was less laughter and more serious faces as the players tried to out-trade one another through mathematical analysis. wolfx won the game with double the cash of the nearest competitor and earn the title of the richest chinky in Chinatown.
As i left with Hamburgum to decipher the rules for the next gaming session, blownfreaks & wife, jack208, wonglc, wolfx and patomas soldier on into the night with round #2 of gaming.
