Post by Gilvan Blight on Dec 10, 2007 10:15:18 GMT -5
Just a quick look at the games we played last weekend at the after hours gaming event at Hugin and Munin.
[glow=red,2,300]Shogun[/glow]
The first game we played through was Shogun, the new one from Queen games that is a muti-lingual remake of the hit German game Wallenstien.
The players were Oddzilla as Red, Pandoragreen as Blue, GhostWes as Black and myself as Yellow. We used the set starting positions for a four player game to make things more balanced for players who had not played before.
As usual for a first play of Shogun the first few turns took a very long time as the players learned the intricacies of the game. Shogun is a mix of a Territorial War game and a Realm improvement Eurogame and it takes a bit to get used to this mix. Each turn players have the option to do 10 different things, and each turn they have to decide which province out of the ones to control to do each of these 10 things if any. This makes for a ton of pre-planning and strategy at the start of each game turn.
The game is played through 4 seasons over two years, with Winter being a scoring season. By the end of the second season everyone seemed to have grasped the basics of the rules. By the first Winter Pandora had a strong lead, from the number of buildings and territories she had won during that year. Wes was in second with most of his points coming from territories. I was in third suffering badly during the first rounds at the hands of Wes's armies and having difficulty expanding into neutral territories. Odd had the hardest time of it, as his armies kept being wiped out by farmers in neutral provinces, with him loosing troops quicker then he could make them.
The biggest thing that affected everyone the first year was a bad Winter. We all lost 7 units of rice in Winter (as randomly determined by event cards). This meant that not one of us had enough food for the territories we owned. Wes and Pandora faced the consequences of early expansionism with little food to support it during the Winter Months as a variety of territories revolted. Not many provinces were lost but quite a few armies were devastated.
I think everyone learned a lesson about quick expansion, as well as the need to build buildings after the first Winter. The scoring in Shogun is based on three things. The first is the number of territories owned, the second is number of buildings owned and the third has you dividing the map into 6 (7?) regions with players owning the most of each building type being the only ones scoring. This means that the player who develops his/her land more often scores more points then the person who just conquers neutral lands. This also means that conquering already developed territories from another player is a win win situation as you get points for the province and points for buildings you didn't have to pay to build.
This was the driving force of the second year. All players spent a lot more time building up their defenses and adding buildings to their well defended provinces and spent less time expanding. Everyone also faced the dilemma of economics. It can be very hard to figure out how to spend your money, and when to spend it, especially if you don't know when you will be able to collect taxes (as often happens as turn order is determined randomly and half of it is hidden from the players during the planning stages of each turn). This led pretty much all of us to waste turns where we wanted to build something but could not. This second year also saw a couple of us (definitely me, and I think Odd at least once) mess up on the order of things, were you planned on doing something only to find out you didn't want to do it by the time that turn came around.
Once the fighting started, it was much more cut throat year two. This year saw people attempting to capture provinces with buildings already built, or provinces that were rich in rice or gold being taken before the harvest or tax turn so that players couldn't collect. The main battles happened in the final Fall Season. By the end Wes had taken most of the bottom of the board and a good section of the middle, Pandora had most of the left top side of the board, Odd had only the right hand bottom of the board left (after getting crushed on his left front by Pandora), and I just had a smattering of poorly defended provinces in the middle top.
Wes seemed to own half of Japan at this point and I thought he had the game. I was off though, and once scoring was completed it worked out that Pandora had won by 1 point. I think what did it most for her was owning pretty much the entire light green territory to the left of the board, where every building she built counted as 'the most'. I was about 15 points behind the two leaders and Odd was about 15 behind me.
All in all I thought Wes played excellently for never having played before, and Pandora played just as well with only one game of Wallenstien under her belt from years ago. I was impressed by how well Odd picked up the game as this was pretty much his first Eurogame experience with only traditional games like Monopoly/Life/Scrabble under his belt.
I'm certain all the players had a great time with this one, and it still stands as one of the best games in my collection (if not the best). I know I'm looking forward to a future rematch.
[glow=red,2,300]Descent: Journeys in the Dark[/glow]
After some Panzerottis from Franco's we decided to break out Descent. As most people playing had never played before we decided on quest number 1.
We added Huginandmunin to the mix of players for this one bringing the game to it's full 5 players. I took the role of Overlord and the other 4 'made their characters'. Pandora was an Orc fighter with only one hand, who specialized in making 3 attacks a turn and moving using fatigue. H&M played a Ranger with a Falcon pet who outshot Hawkeye by the end of the game. Wes played the attractive but useless acrobat, one of the balanced characters that isn't that great. By the end of the game though he became an integral supporting character, using Leadership to allow other characters to rest or aim, while using runes to heal up the party and deal the occasional damage. Odd played a Giant Minotaur who was addicted to Healing Potions that spent more either in town or drinking potions then he did battling, though he was a formidable sight with his various two handed axes.
This game started off very slow due to the amount of rules that needed to be explained. One of the biggest failings of this one is the fact that none of the rules are where you would want them: on the cards and character sheets. Instead they are buried in the rulebook. This combined with the fact that the characters all had odd skills and rare items like familiars meant that rule teaching took a long time. By the time the party got to area two I think everyone had it down, but that was 4 hours later.
That was the biggest noteworthy part of this game. It's long. Very long. Especially with players who are totally new to the game added to players with very little experience with it. We didn't finish this one until about 2:30 AM. Not that we didn't have fun, but I thought Pandora was going to fall asleep on the table.
The game itself went well, if a little one sided for the Heroes. I came out strong at the beginning trying my hardest to finish off Oddzilla. I just couldn't take him down though, as he quaffed potions quicker the I could hurt him. He went through so many potions that I don't think Odd will ever be able to live down his Addicted to Healing role in this game. We were all laughing about it by room two and didn't stop. I wish I had kept track of just how many potions he drank.
What hurt me the most in the early game was a lack of Spawn Cards. This combined with the accursed rat familiar who kept taking away my chances to spawn when I had cards meant that for the first half of the game the players only had to worry about the creatures that started in each area (with a few minor exceptions). What the lack of spawn cards did let me do though is build up threat to play some really nasty traps and get some cards like Doom (all mobs roll an extra power die) out early.
Unfortunately it was all too little too late. By the time the players got to the third room they already had equipment combos that had them rolling what seemed like 20 dice an attack (more like 6-8). There wasn't much I could toss at them that would last more then one round. My goal at that point became to just try to cause any damage each round, as killing a player just didn't seem possible. I came close in the final room, but that's about it.
Overall I was only able to cause one player death, that of Wes's near useless Acrobat. There should have been at least two more, if that damn Minotaur would have taken at least one breath between potions. This meant the players finished with something like 18 Conquest tokens, meaning that even if the game went on I would have had to kill each of them twice just to make a dent in their power. So it was a pretty lopsided game. I think mainly due to a 'perfect storm' of characters and skills. The party had two fighters and an archer, and that meant that the balanced character could focus on magic. While it didn't seem to work well at first, soon after finding their first copper chest the party had a set of defined roles that just meant they powered through the dungeon.
All in all I think everyone enjoyed this one as well, though I think we have all agreed that next time we want to play Descent, we play to only play Descent and start the game well before 9:00PM
The event itself I thought went well. We didn't have the participation I had hoped for, which was too bad, but I think everyone that was there had a good time. There was another group of 4 players there who were having fun with Inn Fighting and Super Munchkin (well if you call arguing about rules fun, they were having fun), as well as our group of Samurai and Heroes.
We will be having another similar event on December 30th, a Sunday, after hours at Hugin and Munin again. I will definatley be bringing Shogun for that re-match, but I think I will leave Descent at home, and save that for another night.
[glow=red,2,300]Shogun[/glow]
The first game we played through was Shogun, the new one from Queen games that is a muti-lingual remake of the hit German game Wallenstien.
The players were Oddzilla as Red, Pandoragreen as Blue, GhostWes as Black and myself as Yellow. We used the set starting positions for a four player game to make things more balanced for players who had not played before.
As usual for a first play of Shogun the first few turns took a very long time as the players learned the intricacies of the game. Shogun is a mix of a Territorial War game and a Realm improvement Eurogame and it takes a bit to get used to this mix. Each turn players have the option to do 10 different things, and each turn they have to decide which province out of the ones to control to do each of these 10 things if any. This makes for a ton of pre-planning and strategy at the start of each game turn.
The game is played through 4 seasons over two years, with Winter being a scoring season. By the end of the second season everyone seemed to have grasped the basics of the rules. By the first Winter Pandora had a strong lead, from the number of buildings and territories she had won during that year. Wes was in second with most of his points coming from territories. I was in third suffering badly during the first rounds at the hands of Wes's armies and having difficulty expanding into neutral territories. Odd had the hardest time of it, as his armies kept being wiped out by farmers in neutral provinces, with him loosing troops quicker then he could make them.
The biggest thing that affected everyone the first year was a bad Winter. We all lost 7 units of rice in Winter (as randomly determined by event cards). This meant that not one of us had enough food for the territories we owned. Wes and Pandora faced the consequences of early expansionism with little food to support it during the Winter Months as a variety of territories revolted. Not many provinces were lost but quite a few armies were devastated.
I think everyone learned a lesson about quick expansion, as well as the need to build buildings after the first Winter. The scoring in Shogun is based on three things. The first is the number of territories owned, the second is number of buildings owned and the third has you dividing the map into 6 (7?) regions with players owning the most of each building type being the only ones scoring. This means that the player who develops his/her land more often scores more points then the person who just conquers neutral lands. This also means that conquering already developed territories from another player is a win win situation as you get points for the province and points for buildings you didn't have to pay to build.
This was the driving force of the second year. All players spent a lot more time building up their defenses and adding buildings to their well defended provinces and spent less time expanding. Everyone also faced the dilemma of economics. It can be very hard to figure out how to spend your money, and when to spend it, especially if you don't know when you will be able to collect taxes (as often happens as turn order is determined randomly and half of it is hidden from the players during the planning stages of each turn). This led pretty much all of us to waste turns where we wanted to build something but could not. This second year also saw a couple of us (definitely me, and I think Odd at least once) mess up on the order of things, were you planned on doing something only to find out you didn't want to do it by the time that turn came around.
Once the fighting started, it was much more cut throat year two. This year saw people attempting to capture provinces with buildings already built, or provinces that were rich in rice or gold being taken before the harvest or tax turn so that players couldn't collect. The main battles happened in the final Fall Season. By the end Wes had taken most of the bottom of the board and a good section of the middle, Pandora had most of the left top side of the board, Odd had only the right hand bottom of the board left (after getting crushed on his left front by Pandora), and I just had a smattering of poorly defended provinces in the middle top.
Wes seemed to own half of Japan at this point and I thought he had the game. I was off though, and once scoring was completed it worked out that Pandora had won by 1 point. I think what did it most for her was owning pretty much the entire light green territory to the left of the board, where every building she built counted as 'the most'. I was about 15 points behind the two leaders and Odd was about 15 behind me.
All in all I thought Wes played excellently for never having played before, and Pandora played just as well with only one game of Wallenstien under her belt from years ago. I was impressed by how well Odd picked up the game as this was pretty much his first Eurogame experience with only traditional games like Monopoly/Life/Scrabble under his belt.
I'm certain all the players had a great time with this one, and it still stands as one of the best games in my collection (if not the best). I know I'm looking forward to a future rematch.
[glow=red,2,300]Descent: Journeys in the Dark[/glow]
After some Panzerottis from Franco's we decided to break out Descent. As most people playing had never played before we decided on quest number 1.
We added Huginandmunin to the mix of players for this one bringing the game to it's full 5 players. I took the role of Overlord and the other 4 'made their characters'. Pandora was an Orc fighter with only one hand, who specialized in making 3 attacks a turn and moving using fatigue. H&M played a Ranger with a Falcon pet who outshot Hawkeye by the end of the game. Wes played the attractive but useless acrobat, one of the balanced characters that isn't that great. By the end of the game though he became an integral supporting character, using Leadership to allow other characters to rest or aim, while using runes to heal up the party and deal the occasional damage. Odd played a Giant Minotaur who was addicted to Healing Potions that spent more either in town or drinking potions then he did battling, though he was a formidable sight with his various two handed axes.
This game started off very slow due to the amount of rules that needed to be explained. One of the biggest failings of this one is the fact that none of the rules are where you would want them: on the cards and character sheets. Instead they are buried in the rulebook. This combined with the fact that the characters all had odd skills and rare items like familiars meant that rule teaching took a long time. By the time the party got to area two I think everyone had it down, but that was 4 hours later.
That was the biggest noteworthy part of this game. It's long. Very long. Especially with players who are totally new to the game added to players with very little experience with it. We didn't finish this one until about 2:30 AM. Not that we didn't have fun, but I thought Pandora was going to fall asleep on the table.
The game itself went well, if a little one sided for the Heroes. I came out strong at the beginning trying my hardest to finish off Oddzilla. I just couldn't take him down though, as he quaffed potions quicker the I could hurt him. He went through so many potions that I don't think Odd will ever be able to live down his Addicted to Healing role in this game. We were all laughing about it by room two and didn't stop. I wish I had kept track of just how many potions he drank.
What hurt me the most in the early game was a lack of Spawn Cards. This combined with the accursed rat familiar who kept taking away my chances to spawn when I had cards meant that for the first half of the game the players only had to worry about the creatures that started in each area (with a few minor exceptions). What the lack of spawn cards did let me do though is build up threat to play some really nasty traps and get some cards like Doom (all mobs roll an extra power die) out early.
Unfortunately it was all too little too late. By the time the players got to the third room they already had equipment combos that had them rolling what seemed like 20 dice an attack (more like 6-8). There wasn't much I could toss at them that would last more then one round. My goal at that point became to just try to cause any damage each round, as killing a player just didn't seem possible. I came close in the final room, but that's about it.
Overall I was only able to cause one player death, that of Wes's near useless Acrobat. There should have been at least two more, if that damn Minotaur would have taken at least one breath between potions. This meant the players finished with something like 18 Conquest tokens, meaning that even if the game went on I would have had to kill each of them twice just to make a dent in their power. So it was a pretty lopsided game. I think mainly due to a 'perfect storm' of characters and skills. The party had two fighters and an archer, and that meant that the balanced character could focus on magic. While it didn't seem to work well at first, soon after finding their first copper chest the party had a set of defined roles that just meant they powered through the dungeon.
All in all I think everyone enjoyed this one as well, though I think we have all agreed that next time we want to play Descent, we play to only play Descent and start the game well before 9:00PM
The event itself I thought went well. We didn't have the participation I had hoped for, which was too bad, but I think everyone that was there had a good time. There was another group of 4 players there who were having fun with Inn Fighting and Super Munchkin (well if you call arguing about rules fun, they were having fun), as well as our group of Samurai and Heroes.
We will be having another similar event on December 30th, a Sunday, after hours at Hugin and Munin again. I will definatley be bringing Shogun for that re-match, but I think I will leave Descent at home, and save that for another night.