Session still on as normal but we’ve moved to blownfreak’s place due to his car broke down and can’t go out :P.
So me, blownfreaks, keealvin and his friend played Galaxy Trucker (with the BIG expansion) and Vineta at blownfreak’s house:
I sort of felt that the base game was a little too easy. So for the first game, we played the new board IA from the Big Expansion.
Now this is a brutal board. The basic game board I had some empty spaces where the meteors could not hit the spaceship. Now every dice rolls resulted in a hit!
This is my ship after the first training mission for keealvin’s friend. I did not do too well either, half of my ship broke off from meteor strikes, leaving the ship core exposed and dangerously close to destruction.
After the first training mission, we quickly redo the first mission as most of us except blownfreaks finished the mission with negative points! Then we moved to the second mission. We used the new board IIA for this mission and to our surprise, the board came with two ship slots!
There’s some wrinkles to this version of Galaxy Trucker as now we have to babysit two vessels to make sure they reach the finishing line. There’s even a possibility of one half of the ship not making it due to meteors or space pirates. Right off the bat, seasoned galaxy trucker blownfreaks found himself with only one half of a ship as he forgot to put cabin space for his crews in the other half of his fleet! Insane.
Other than that snafu, the rest of us managed to reach port safely as most of the space events are quite safe and goods laden.
The third mission found ourselves with the spaceship class IIIA from the base game. As this was boring, we added some new spaceship modules to the tiles mix which saw some funky technologies such as stassis capsules that can store astronauts and furnaces that can convert goods ito batteries.
Thinking it was not enough, me and blownfreaks decided to add in tougher challenges from the ‘Rough Road Ahead’ deck to keealvin’s horror. Our level III difficulty revealed Bad Luck, Meteoric Inversion and Explosive Goods. So before our ship building begins, we’ve already knew that: 1. Meteor showers will keep showering until it hits or drains someone’s shields, 2. Small meteors are now large meteors and vice versa and 3. destruction of of cargo space with goods will result in all surrounding tiles going off in a big fiery explodey!
The good news for us is that there were not many goods to pick up, so there weren’t any explodey goods wrecking our ships. The bad news is that due to the combination of Bad Luck and Meteoric Inversion, there were lots of persistant large Meteors that refused to go away until they wreck something. At the end, blownfreaks, keealvin and my ship were utterly destroyed while keealvin’s friend escape unscathed due to his configuration of maximum laser coverage for all four directions! Curse ye, for taking all the lasers!
Next we moved to Vineta before calling it a night.
blownfreaks contemplating which part of Vineta should he sink now.
keealvin and friend plotting to split the houses of the sunk district between them.
This game uses the simultaneous action selection mechanic to sink beautiful pieces of Vineta’s districts. It has a Clans sort of scoring, which truth to be told, wasn’t my favourite. There’s a lot of screwage action going on in this game as it’s quite easy to swing the balance of power with the exchange action. Some diplomacy is also essential to make sure the other players don’t gang up on you, as keealvin’s friend found to his detriment…
Perhaps I’ll need to play it again as my first impression is that it’s quite chaotic and disconnected from the theme.
I was watching Astro on Sunday and lo and behold, two cycling events were shown back to back. Ever since playing Leader 1, I had always wondered whether the mechanics suited the theme. Here’s my observation:
1. In the TV, the Peloton (main group) won one of the race while about 4 riders finished the race ahead of the Peloton in the other race. So the conclusion can be drawn here is that, it is quite realistic that the Peloton finish the race in 1st place!
2. Breaking away can be a risky gamble that can end up with the riders being spent out too early. Hence there were riders which finished the race behind the Peloton.
3. Breaking away is also a strategy to make the riders in the Peloton use up their energy to catch up with the breakaway leaders.
4. Slipstreaming is paramount importance in cycling. Being in the Peloton ensures that there is ample amount of slipstream from the group, thus saving energy.
5. The leader of the Peloton changes almost constantly. This ensures that the leader that breaks the wind, is constantly rotated and the energy usage is shared throughout the group.
6. The Peloton catches up the the breakaway riders quite fast! I was surprised at the speed in which the Peloton pursues the breakaway leaders. Everyone spends that bit more energy to pursue the breakaway leaders. It takes a lot of energy of the breakaway leaders to stay ahead.
7. Breakaway packs also uses slipstreaming to help slow down the time the Peloton group catches up. It helps if the breakaway packs are of the same team. At one point, the TV event had two breakaway packs and a cyclist in the 2nd breakaway pack refused to help the others just because his team mate was in the 1st breakaway pack! Talk about team tactics.
8. There’s a reason why cycling tours are often conducted in stages. One particular stage might favour climbers, another might favour sprinters. The final score of the individual cyclist is counted by how far ahead the cyclist was ahead of the Peloton. Some cyclists can make it ahead of the Peloton in certain stages while others do better in other stages. The sum of those times are added up, contributing to the overall Tour score for the individual cyclist. Another way to think of this is like the 18 hole golf course and the Peloton is the moving par. For each stage you went ahead of the Peloton, you score the time difference.
9. Of course there are some funky awards like yellow jersey and King of the Mountain which were beyond my understanding of their significance in this one sitting of TV viewing.
10. The game Leader 1 can be said to be reasonably accurate depiction of cycling but as blownfreaks sort of alluded to, it kinda sucks when the winner is the Peloton (as a whole). Technically speaking, the Peloton leader, whoever was lucky enough to be holding it at the time, wins it.
11. Cyclists do sprint like crazy at the last final few hundred meters of the race. So a game, if analysed to death, might result in no one breaking away for the whole game until the last final tile?
This meetup started as jack208 was away and I took over organising duties. blownfreaks happened to get all his new games from Singapore and volunteered his trove for gaming. keealvin and patomas got on the bandwagon and together we divvy up the rules reading for our very special session of foursome quartet gaming.
Game 1: Leader 1 - rules by ayheng (myself)
Leader 1 is a cycling game and I was interested in it after hearing that it is a more advanced version of Formula De/D. blownfreaks and keealvin complained that the rulebook was overly complicated and I too find it so. However I managed to summarised it all to them in a hopefully coherent manner.
Basically, there are 3 cyclist in each team and each are specialist on flat roads, steep mountains or a balance between the two. Each cyclist have the same amount of starting energy and the only difference is in the amount of energy they would use for different stretches of the road.
Unlike Formula De, the decision of movement does not involve the roll of a die. Intead, riders spend energy to move ahead in an ever decreasing efficiency scale. Every extra step uses even more energy than before.
The main way to conserve energy is to move with the ‘peloton’, the main group of riders. The other way to conserve energy is to ’slipstream’ behind another rider.
Thus the game is to manage your rider’s energy, find the best timing to ‘break away’ from the ‘peloton’ and slipstream efficiently to edge out your opponent.
The only randomness in the game is the random risk of tire puncture which can affect everyone and the risk of pushing too hard on the uphill or downhill.
In this game, some of us cluelessly broke away from the main pack too early.
Those early leaders ended up getting chased by the pack and some of us even cluelessly drop off some of our riders from the main pack.
Some hilarity ensued as blownfreaks’ cyclist got tire puncture out of the blue due to bad luck.
As we near the downhill slope near the middle of the race, riders start to break away from the pack.
Lo and behold, who should drop by but jack208 and waiyan, supposedly tired from flying but was still lured by the games in play.
nearing the end of the downhill and every tom, dick and harry riders have already broken away from the pack.
As we come into the final turn, riders start to feel the strain of their earlier exertion and start to fall behind the pack!
Overall a quite ‘AP’ game as described by blownfreaks. We did not know the correct timing to break away and we did not use slip stream to help our riders among each other. Quite a difficult game to grasp. Maybe if one of us understood cycling maybe we could have understood and ‘gamed’ the mechanics better. As it stands, most of our riders would have lost to the pack!
Game 2: Genji - rules by keealvin.
A simple game but with overly difficult rules, simply because the mechanics are a little detached from the theme.
The theme is that the players are courtiers seeking to woo the court beauties by writing poems, the point is to become the ‘Genji’, legendary poem writer. The problem is that the poems as written on the cards are quite lame sounding and the players don’t feel like reading them out loud to enhance the mood. It becomes quite the game of matching symbols and cursing when the beauties you have wooed suddenly fell enchanted by another player’s symbol matching, err.. i mean seduction.
The game moves quite fast but at the end of it, some of us feel it is overly long. But perhaps if we had made more effort on getting in ‘theme’…
Game 3: Chicago Express - rules by blownfreaks
Now this game is definitely the game of the night.
It is 18XX-ish but in less than an hour. It is so good and over so quickly that we played two games of it!
The game has railroad companies, auctioning of shares, track laying and city development. However, unlike 18XX, everything has been super-speeded up. Players can easily reach the destination of Chicago by the 3rd or 4th turn.
Chicago Express takes the time-value characteristics of money in an 18XX game and distilled it down to its very essence. The game can be said to be entirely based on the concept of share price and whether the returns are appropriate enough to justify it.
There are lots of ways to screw up players’ calculations and the tightly interwoven mechanics can sometimes hide the effects. For example, certain railroad companies have lots of shares and the price paid for their shares should be lower to account for their possible share dilution. However, the price also should not be too low such that an opposing player might take the share cheap to drive the company to the ground!
Overall a promising game which has subtle mechanics interaction and judging by the reactions, it should be hitting the table again soon.
Game 4: Pandemic - rules by patomas
This is a cooperative game in which players work together to rid the world of diseases.
Not much to comment except that we won by the skin of out teeth. I guess the attraction might be that the different setup might warrant a different approach towards winning the game. Other than that, it still feels like a multiplayer puzzle game which appeals to the happy-happy ‘we’re all in this together’ helpful mood.
In Summary: A fantastic game night, a focused game group enjoying a planned number of games together. Expect to see Chicago Express again soon!
Chilly Pan Mee from the Kin Kin Restaurant area.
Verdict: Unique enough, but won’t be craving for it constantly.
Attended a colleague’s traditional Malay wedding at a small town near Teluk Intan. Practically the whole village turned up for lunch, so there was this constant stream of people coming and going. Some pics for the event:
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