Some New Things I Played This Month
Sorry for the long period of time in between posts! I have had a lot going on over the past couple of weeks, and starting on Sunday I will be a college graduate. Finally! As such, I have not gotten a whole lot of gaming in lately, but I have played enough to warrant a post about some of the new things I have played this month and my impressions of them.
End of our Germany game.
End of our Ireland game. Devon was red.
Here is the list: 7 Wonders, Acquire, Age of Steam: Germany, Age of Steam: Ireland, Small World: Cursed!, Small World: Be Not Afraid..., Small World: Grand Dames of Small World, and Scene It? Comedy Movies.
7 Wonders is one of the hottest new games of 2011. After playing it, I can say that it is one of the hottest games for a good reason. This game is great! So great, in fact, that I played it five times in one night. Not many games grab me like that. At its heart, 7 Wonders is a card drafting game with a heavy emphasis on set collection. Each player has control of a wonder that they are trying to build. Throughout the game they will be developing their civilization by collecting different types of cards. There are three turns in the game and on each turn the players will receive a number of cards depending on the number of players for their starting hand. The players choose a card and play it, passing the rest of the cards to the neighbor on the left. This goes on until all of the cards except for one are played. The second round starts and cards are passed to the right. After that is the final round and cards are passed to the left again and scoring occurs to determine the winner. Rather basic gameplay.
The meat is in the options each player has when selecting cards. As I mentioned before, each player has two neighbors, and those are the only other players that can directly affect you. They are the people you pay attention to. There are a few different types of cards: military, science, victory points, resources, and guilds. Resources are the cards needed to play any other type of card in the game, so they are very important even though they score no points at the end of the game. For every other type of card, you really have to pay attention to your neighbors. You don't want to collect the same things as your neighbors, this will only serve to hurt both of you, but you don't want to fall behind either. Balance is key in this game. At the end of each round, you look at both of your neighbors and compare military values. If you have more than your neighbors (one or both), you will gain military victory points. If you have less military than your neighbors (one or both), you will gain negative military victory points. This is the only scoring that is done throughout the game. All other scoring occurs at the end of the final round and everything is added up and the winner is determined.
Each player also has control of a wonder that they can build onto throughout the game that will provide bonus victory points or special abilities to them. This game is filled with options. The best part about this game is the scalability. The game plays up to seven and plays in around 30 minutes! Having played with four to seven players, I can honestly say that the game DOES play that quickly (with fewer players it plays quicker) with seven. It is truly amazing. in my opinion, this is a game that everyone should own if the premise sounds interesting. This one fills a void in my collection that no other game can. It packs a lot of strategy into a short play time and supports a large number of players. Buy it.
I can finally say that I have played this Sid Sackson classic. This is my type of game, too! Acquire is an economic game that revolves around the buying and selling of stock in a number of hotel chains. Those of you that know me personally or have been reading the blog for the past month know my love for Chicago Express. It should come as no surprise that I really enjoyed this game when I played it. I loved the stock purchasing mechanic here as the player with the most shares in a company was the president and had the power of guiding that company's actions. What makes Acquire different is how the hotel chains interact on the board. Whenever two companies touch on the board, the larger hotel absorbs the smaller hotel. When this happens the players that own stock in the smaller hotel can either cash out their stock or trade in stock for stock in the larger company. This creates a lot of interesting interplay between the players. Who is going to absorb who? Will they cash out or trade in? Do I want them to trade in? How does that affect my presidency? So many things to think about, and that is what makes Acquire fun. If you enjoy economic games or want to give one a try, you cannot go wrong with this classic title. I would suggest everyone give this game a try if they get the opportunity. Myself? I will be buying it.
I am going to roll these two expansions into one section. I have talked about my love for Age of Steam in other posts, so I will spare you of that here. I am just going to give you a brief impression of each of these two maps, now that I have played them.
First up: Germany. This map was a lot of fun and one of my favorites so far. I cannot wait to come back to it. The big changes from the base game for this map were the interurban links and Berlin getting cubes on every turn. The map is an expensive map, as we found out on our play. It was a very tight game and a very fun game. We were playing five players (three of them were new) and thought this would be a good map for the number. We were right, for the most part. I am not sure that this was the best map for some of the new players to learn on, but they seemed to enjoy themselves and all of them expressed interest in playing again. The map is not cheap. This means that your purchasing decisions really need to be spot on and competition for goods cubes can be really fierce. Of course, these are the things that make Age of Steam fun! I really want to play this one again. I give this map an 8.
End of our Germany game.Ireland. The England and Ireland expansion has been out of print for quite a while and is quite expensive to get a hold of. However, the files are available online if one wishes to have the maps printed. I chose to do this for the Ireland map. I do not regret the decision at all! Ireland was quite brutal and the three of us that played agreed: this is the toughest map we have played yet. Granted we have only played a few maps, but it was one tough game! The Ireland map is one of economic depression. There are few goods cubes available to the players, and this causes a lot of competition for the limited resources. Additionally, there are fewer cities to deliver to as some cities on the map cannot receive goods. Again, this creates a lot of tension and competition between players. In addition to this, the locomotive action is essentially useless on the map as it does not let you move goods on your turn if you select it. Yes, this is one brutal map. It isn't the terrain that gets you on this one, it is how limited your options are. We still had a lot of fun, and Devon finally got a win (granted it was right before he left for a 6 month stint playing bass for a cruise line). I look forward to playing it at some point in the future. Maybe after Korea?
End of our Ireland game. Devon was red. Small World expansions
Small World is a game that I have now decided I am ambivalent on. I don't dislike it, but it isn't something I am going to suggest. It is a good game, but not one that I am interested in. I first played it at DragonCon in 2009 with my uncle and another guy and thought it was alright then. Now that I have played it again, I think I have had my fill. Small World is an area control game where each of the players bids on fantasy races and then uses them to control sections of the board for points. You play for a set number of turns and the person with the most points wins. The expansions just add a bunch of new races and traits. We didn't use the event cards. The expansions did not change my mind on the game as all they did was add more of the same. There wasn't anything particularly interesting about any of the new races and I didn't feel that they really added anything to the game. Not a bad game and not bad expansions, it just is not something I have any interest in playing. Your mileage may vary.
The Scene It? games are a bit hit and miss for me. I enjoy the original Movie edition and I enjoyed the Seinfeld version. I would probably enjoy the Star Trek version if I ever decide to pick that one up. But every other version I have played has fallen flat for me. I just am not all that into these games, but aside from that the theme directly relates to the enjoyment I will get from the game (surprise, surprise!). I DO NOT like the Harry Potter version (I don't really like Harry Potter in general). I DO NOT like the ESPN version (sports trivia isn't my thing). And the TV version was OK. The Comedy Movies edition falls into the OK category for me. The theme of this one doesn't grab me as I have a pretty specific taste in comedy movies and this game focused a lot on Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, Jim Carrey and the like. If you like those actors and their studios, you will probably like this game. The one saving grace was that my team (Dad and I) won on a Monty Python question that I got right! I will play this one, but I won't ever suggest it. Not my cup of tea.
There you have it. Some impressions of new titles that I played this month. Some are definite buys for me, others are not. And that is fine. I just love to play games!
I would love to hear from readers, so feel free to post your impressions of new games that you played this month or sometime recently in the comment section! Disagree with me? Let me know!
I will have a lot of free time over the next couple of months, so look for more posts coming soon. Come June I will be doing a special series of daily posts on my trip to the Origins Game Fair, so stay tuned!
Until next time, keep playing and keep winning!
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