(left: Nelson, right: Blownfreaks)
This day saw the return of Nelson back to OTK, unfortunately into the jaws of Age of Steam sharks.
(pic: Afif)
Afif, the other AOS newbie learning the ropes.
(left: me, middle:kaz)
I did what I normally do and secure the locomotive action early on.
It was a landslide victory for me, my link (green) also went from east to west unmolested. I think it’s all from years of training with Jedi Master friedricetheman. All the newbies also did well and came out in positive territory (no bankruptcies).
rhyen (middle) teaching two newcomers (Go club members?) Boomtown. Elsewhere neulwy plays Pickomino and Coloretto with the casual gamers group.
What to do with more players? Bring out Long Shot, of course! Effendy (right) joins us for this game.
kaz, Afif and Effendy looking seriously at their cards to manipulate the race outcomes.
gleeful thoughts of card manipulation mischief.
rhyen lending a helping hand to Afif
Eight’s Enough wins!
Jimmy (middle) joins for Amun-Re.
I’d only played this game once online, and some ideas were lost in the electronic translation.
End of first Epoch. In the online game, I couldn’t see how farmers were important to secure a flow of income, but it struck me as I took my time to compare the various auction areas.
This is a thinky game.
End of 2nd epoch. I came last in the 1st epoch scoring but rebounded strongly in the 2nd one. In both epochs, the highest scorers were the owners of the areas with the temples. In both epochs the Nile always flooded over before the scoring. If this happens often enough, more competition should have been made for the temple areas. As it is, we were all 1st time players.
Last we did 18Scan, Jimmy, rhyen, jack208 and myself. Some funkiness happened during the auction round and we all ended with unequal proportions of companies. jack208 here have a minor company.
Myself have 2 minor companies.
Jimmy went for 2 public companies, one of which was converted from a private company.
While rhyen went for two private companies and a public company. The 2nd public company came as a result of a takeover of jack208′s public company.
As expected, the SNJ runs generated a ton of cash for rhyen who proceeded to buy out jack208′s VR. The private companies owned by rhyen also helped to generate early cash for the takeover.
Jimmy’s company started slow as he was gambling on generating more cash via his private before it closes. However this causes DSB to underperform due to the lost time. His NSB also suffered from lack of capital and by the time we decided to call it, had financial troubles.
The minors owned by jack208 and myself had an initial strong run, however, we found that there were two problems: the returns generated were inferior to the price we paid for them. By the time minor companies were merged into the SJ railways and realising its true potential, rhyen’s SNJ was far ahead. We then decided to call it then and there as there was no way to catch up with rhyen’s investments.
Sorry for the late postup but been experiencing some trouble with the picture gallery functions. While waiting for my webmaster to sort it out, I’m posting to the boardgamecafe blog and crossposting it back here:
The game session started with El Grande.
(left: Crabzai, right:Blownfreaks)
Oldie but goldie. Played it only once before, still not doing great in this session.
(left: me)
I put many people onto my ‘court’ unaware that there are nefarious cards that can wipe them all out!
We did Acquire with some variant rules purchased off Boardgamegeek.
(left: Nicola)
Not sure if I like the variant rules, maybe I’m too used to the ‘classic’ rules.
I did badly in this game, my initial investment into Sackson did not bear fruit until very much later.
We then did Dungeon Lords.
I’m tending to classify this game towards the medium-weighty side from the heavy-thinky category right now. I feel that the choices are pretty straight forward when you’re familiar with what other players will tend to choose.
(not captured in all pictures: jack208 and neulwy)
The gang starts with China - apparently this game was so easy that rhyen multitasked on his laptop while aycee multitasked on his hands-free…
waiyan takes the game more seriously while explaining the rules to akmal (i hope i got his name right). I was busy eating while wolfx reads up the Dungeon Lords rules to get an idea on what the fuss is all about.
Now we’re playing Aladdin’s Dragon or rather ‘Morgenland‘ as stated on the box. This of course is the German version of a classic game. Here blownfreaks is explaining the game to wolfx while crabzai looks on… either at the game or the rootbeer float…
Aladdin’s Dragon was totally a random bidding game, so much so that wolfx felt compelled to ponder on his next move.
There be gems in this game! … and German texts!
Meanwhile, the China gang finished their game and started Funny Friends.
Here’s a Dungeon Lords Academy in session after both Aladdin’s Dragon and Funny Friends game.
And here’s an actual 3-player Dungeon Lords game in session. Remember, you do not want to attract the Paladin unless you are ready and you want to!
aycee did well for his first game, so much so that he had a demon and a golem to demolish the adventurers in the 2nd year.
waiyan, cmun and rhyen punching out tiles to play the new set of Wasabi.
Wasabi game in progress.
The elusive jack208 caught on aycee’s camera. From the expression on his and waiyan’s face, this is a totally random game which causes pondering.
Games we brought that night.
Me, jack208, aycee and rhyen finished off the night with Puerto Rico while wolfx watches with his brain hurting from Dungeon Lords. We replace the harbor, factory and wharf trinity as well as the ineffective university with the lighthouse, specialty factory, library and union hall from the Puerto Rico Expansion. However it was all to no avail as I swept the game with another unholy trinity: small market, large market and office. Maybe the next game we can replace all of the buildings as suggested by rhyen.
Right, so we had a quick gaming session yesterday, quick meaning two games and we ended at 4am.
impatient imps waiting to be deployed into dungeons while rhyen undergoes dungeon lord training
jack208 dropped by at 8.30pm while rhyen reached at 10pm. I did a trial explanation of the Dungeon Lords rules to jack208 and stumbled here and there but by the time I taught it to rhyen, I was going at a rapid clip.
one of the training scenarios
The rules explanation was easier than I thought but it was helped no doubt by jack208 and rhyen’s fascination with the puzzle-solving aspect of the training scenarios. I think casual gamers might be turned off immediately with the training. However it is of paramount importance as I observed that in all four training missions, jack208 and rhyen had numerous questions, either one of which could turned out to be game breakers if went unexplained.
Explaining Dungeon Lords
jack208’s starting dungeon
imps mining and working the dungeon rooms
invading adventurers
So what did we think of this game? I thought it was fantastic, it went at a fast pace and there were only twelve actions to be taken before the adventurers start pillaging through your dungeon. The actions selection was less crowded than anticipated and the game wasn’t as tough as some claimed.
individual dungeon lords action selection
The main game action selection board
one of the monsters for hire. the kiddy artwork is misleading, the game IS complicated.
Of course there’s a caveat that we did two rules wrong, one was that we did not paid the monster’s hiring costs as we thought it applied only on Pay Day. Hence we were quite low on our Evil-o-meter and the Evil Reduction action did not have to be taken often. We also failed to attract the Paladin due to our failure to pay for the monster’s hiring cost with the Evil-o-meter. It could have posted a challenge for us.
We scored low on the Evil-o-meter
The wizards also got powered down in our game as I thought erroneously that 3 magic points were needed at all times to cast spells. turns out the total magic points needed corresponds to the rounds number eg. Round 1 require 1 magic point, Round 2 require 2 magic points, etc. As it were, we all scored in the 20s.
captured adventurers
jack208 and rhyen professed to like this game more than Galaxy Trucker due to the less random nature of the adventurers pillaging step. There’s control over the type of adventurers to attract, the monsters and traps to employ. Overall a thumbs up.
using jedi mind tricks to find out the next trap card…
Next we did Agricola: Farmers of the Moor. Briefly, this expansion introduced fuel as a additional resource and houses require heating every harvesting phase. The idea is that house expansion will be reined in by this additional requirement.
There is also a novel addition where every player’s board has a pre-determined setup of woods and moors. This does much to differentiate each player’s subsequent development.
The new initial setup
The new free actions is another novel approach as they are useful enough to warrant obtaining at times but taking it it could mean giving up lucrative first picks of the traditional Agricola actions.
Horses are a mixed bag as they could be high point scorers but have low food value. Personally I did not take any horses in my game so I can’t say its impact on the overall game.
I would give this expansion a thumbs up as well as it introduces new niggles to an old game which felt natural and smooth. There’s more things to take care of and to me can be overwhelming at times. Those Minor Improvements and Occupation cards still give me the analysis paralysis.
In our game, I did the traditional farming of grain and vegetables and trying to combo the fishing space with my minor improvements to net me reed and clays along with the action. The braggart come out last and saved me with my multitude of improvements. I have no idea what jack208 and rhyen did as I had my head full just trying to juggle my own farm.
my vegetable farming-fu
jack208’s animal farm
rhyen’s stone house strategy
This meetup saw the return of the prodigal son, aycee to the meetup as well as a newbie, John.
Pan-o-ramic photo provided courtesy of aycee: From left: (leaning down) blownfreaks, neulwy, jack208, john, david, nelson, myself in a game of Bang!
another pan-o-vision: From left:myself, jack208, newbie john who seems to be having a hardcore time analysing, david and rhyen in the Powergrid game.
On right: Mr pan-o-photographer himself, aycee, doing Puerto Rico after many years/months of absence.
Read jack208’s report here,
and aycee’s report here.
One thing aycee and I agree on: The best thing to happen to Old Town Kopitiam since Roti Bakar Hailam: Root Beer Float!
Next Page »