Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii am the Champion, my frie-ends!  
And Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii'll keep Acquiring till the end.... 


Yes, my dear boardgaming friends, I am indeed the Acquire champion of the Hypermind BoardGamers.  Despite having never played this classic game before last month, I have won all 4 games that I've participated in since and now claim the title "Lord of All Acquire"!  (A moniker that I adapted from another modern classic, of course.)  Game night was really excellent this week, and finishing up the Game of the Month! with a perfect record was only the first of several highlights.  So here we go!

Acquire

As I walked into game night last evening, two games of Acquire were already in progress.  Thankfully, one had just begun and I was able to jump right into it, taking a couple of turns back-to-back to get caught up.  Pretty soon, however, I realized that I seemed to be running out of money really fast.  And as I looked over at Carol's bankroll, it seemed like she had an excessive number of $1,000 bills.  I wondered out loud if there had been some mix-up in giving me my starting cash since I jumped in late, with me grabbing $100's meant as change for her while she picked up some of my $1,000's.  It would have been really hard to backtrack and figure it all out, and maybe I'm just making all this up subconsciously to give myself a sympathetic handicap and therefore stroke my ego a little as I regale you all with my stunning comeback story.  But either way, if I was shorted, it was my own stupid fault for not counting the money when I first got it.

So anyway, we were playing with Steve's pretty plastic copy of the game, and they had already decided to play with open money and shares since Carol and Steve's little girl Yarden had never played before.  As always, things got pretty tense when we rolled around to the point in the game where were were out of money and waiting for the first round of mergers.  I caused one that I knew would give Steve the majority payout because I was in second place and had the tiles to restart the chain almost immediately.  A few more take-overs occurred at this stage, but they were pretty balanced between Steve and me.  

The deciding moment of the game came when I had the chance to cause a merger between the growing monster Hydra and my upstart (and twice restarted) Zeta hotel chains.  I got the big payout, and since the board was getting tight, I traded in all my stock for Hydra.  Steve traded in as well, but since it was my turn, I bought up its last few shares in my purchasing phase and ended up with one more stock in it than either Steve or Carol.  The game wasn't over quite yet, and there were a number of other cagey moves that we made along the way, but getting the $11,000 payout for a size-41Hydra at the end of the game while Steve and Carol split the $5,500 second-place payout is what won me the game.
 Time: 65 minutes
Score: Me $39.7k, Steve $38.8, Carol $27.8k, Yarden $19.6k
Ratings: Me 8.5, Steve 7.5, Carol 7, Yarden ? (probably not so good, though, since she wanted to stop playing after turn 5 or so)


The board at the end of the game.
Obviously, I'm excited about Acquire and my ability to win at it.  I know that there's some potential to get screwed by the tile draw, but it hasn't personally happened to me yet, and I'm going to choose to believe that you'd be able to mitigate it somewhat by making smart buying decisions anyway.  I'll certainly be writing a review as soon as I get a chance (after I finish with the one for Small World, of course), and I'll get more into what I think of it there.

Steam: Rails to Riches

We actually had two copies of Steam there last night, so we divided up our 8 players into two groups and played in stereo.  Since I've actually read the rules and played once before, we had one massive rules teach where I tried to explain it all to the six newbies.  We were all playing the Base game again, and using the US/Canada map.

Mostly because I was sitting above the top of the map (and a little because no one else started nearby), I decided to make the "Great Northern Railway" and began building an east-west track all along the northern edge of the board.  Chip and Chris were all tangled together in the southwest area, and Carol took the southeast around Boston.  In the early game, I was feeling like I made a big mistake.  I was unable to ship any goods on turn one, and with having to pay through the nose to build enough track to connect stuff, I was down to -6 on the income track by turn 4.  

But then, I made my big move.  I started using my long track, and jumped to +2 and then +7 income over two turns.  I stole blue goods from Carol in Boston, and either Urbanized or performed City Growth a couple of times on turns 5-7.  We all converted over to victory points at about the same time, but lack of competition and longer track allowed me to score 9-10 points over each of the last 3 turns while everybody else was getting 3-6.  I also managed to complete the most links, and ended up winning by 16 VP.

Time:  70 minutes
Score: Me 47, Carol 31, Chris 31, Chip 30
Ratings: Me 8, Carol 7, Chris 7, Chip 7

We all had a good time, even though it was obvious that my one previous play had given me a big advantage.  They were a little put off by the fiddlyness of finding the right track to use, and the random goods distribution was a little unsettling for Chris.  We talked about it some, however, and all agreed that the game was pretty solid.  I might try to better organize the tiles to make that part a little easier.  And in the end, they all felt like it was a good game after a first play, and that their opinion of it would probably be upwardly mobile with more experience.

Now, I know that we played almost amazingly fast, but when we looked over at the other table, they were still on turn 4 after we finished cleaning up the game and putting it away.  As a filler, we pulled out...

Through the Desert

Through the Desert is one of the first games that I purchased when I was getting into this hobby, but I hadn't played it in a loooong time (and please note that this is apparently the day of enlongated vowel sounds here at GamerChris.com).  Chip refreshed our memories about the rules (which was a little more difficult for Carol since she'd never played before), and we got down to it.  

Personally, I made some strategic mistakes in initial placement, putting too many of my caravan leaders close together.  I was hoping to use them to block off other caravans, but it didn't work for me at all.  Thankfully, I managed to seal off one 10-space section of the board to remain competitive.  In the end, Chris, Chip and I were all too preoccupied with the spatial part of the game and let Carol win 2 and a half caravan majorities, which propelled her to a significant victory.

Time: 30 minutes
Score: Carol 69, Chip 57, Me 54, Chris 53
Ratings: Carol 8.5, Chip 8.5, Me 8, Chris 9

Getting this to the table completes my playing of the unofficial Knizia Tile-Laying Trilogy (along with Samurai and Tigris & Euphrates) over the last couple of months.  And if anything, the absolute freakin' brilliance of these games makes it all the sadder that his efforts are all focused now on his desperate desire to break into the mass-market.  I know that he's trying to make a living at game design, but I just hate that his talent is being wasted on coming up with things like a card game based on a board game that he based on one of his lighter card games.  Still, I've heard good things about Municipium, and maybe I'll pick it up soon to see if he is, in fact, still capable of making a decent "gamer's game". 

If you can believe it, the other table still wasn't finished with their game of Steam.  We waited for a few minutes, but as they were calculating scores and putting the game away, Chip, Chris and I decided to throw down with a game of...

Taluva

All of us really like Taluva, but our play turned out to be a bit rusty.  From the beginning, I got walled off and my initial settlements were pretty much neutered.  I played catch-up for the rest of the game and was pretty much out of contention.  And then, at the end of the game, Chris was so distracted by almost being able to win the game (if he had drawn the right tile) that he missed a really obvious way to block Chip from playing his last Tower and winning.  

Time: 21 minutes
Score: Chip - WIN ( Towers & Temples), Chris and Me - LOSE
Ratings: Chip 8.5, Chris 9.5, Me 8

Again, we really need to get this played more.  Especially when it only takes 20 freaking minutes!

Mission: Red Planet

After playing A Castle for All Seasons over the last couple of weeks, both Chip and I have been thinking about Mission: Red Planet and its similar simultaneous role-selection mechanics.  While I ultimately decided not to bring my copy, Chip had his with him, and I gladly agreed to make this our last game of the night when he suggested it.  Josh and Kenny, fresh off their marathon Steam treatment, were both very excited about the steampunkl theme and gladly joined the two of us.

Josh jumped out to an early lead, managing to pull off an early Travel Agent and getting a lot of astronauts into a couple of Celerium-producing regions (Celerium, of course, being the most valuable resource, worth 3 points each).  My Bonus card was to hae an astronaut in the "top" five regions, which guided my early placements, and after the scoring phase of round 5, I had a ton of Sylvanite (the 2-point resource) and a few Ice (worth 1 point).  

The game just flew by, and we soon powered our way through the second scoring phase and neared the end-game.  Way back on turn 1, I used my Scientist and drew a Discovery card that would randomly change the resource produces by a region at the end of the game.  It was on a Sylvanite region, and hoping that it would switch to a Celerium area, I made sure that I was leading there at the end of the game.  As it turned out, it actually worked out better when the resource was changed to Ice, because the three extra tokens I received from it pushed me over the top to get the 9-point Terraforming bonus, which goes to the player with the most ice at the end of the game.  Ultimately, that proved to be the difference that gave me the win.

Time: 45 minutes
Score: Me 49, Chip 45, Josh 30, Kenny 26
Ratings: Me 8, Chip 7.5, Josh 8, Kenny 8      
   
The game was a total blast.  We all had a good time, and I hope that Mission: Red Planet will see more play soon as well.  But the end of the game (as nice as it was for me) illustrates the one issue that I have with it.  If not for that and one other Discovery card working against Kenny, he would have taken the Terraforming bonus and been a lot more competitive.  And if I hadn't gotten the benefit from it, Chip would have won. 

Discovery cards, and to a slightly lesser extent Bonus cards as well, tend to have game-changing effects.  A lot of times, they are powerful enough to undo most of the nuts-and-bolts work that players have done all game long.  And I know, you can always choose the Scientist role to look at a card, but with only 10 rounds in the game, it's not really a viable thing to do often enough to gather sufficient information.  Because I'm so passionate about M:RP, however, I've started a thread over at BGG to discuss ways to tweak this a little, just to see if we might can make the game even better.  So if you have any ideas, please join the discussion there.


Otherwise, it was still a great way to wrap up the evening.  I had a lot of fun, and I'm hoping that I'll be able to convince Gwen to let me join the gang on Friday for some pre-Independence Day gaming.

Other Games Played

Acquire
Time: 49 minutes
Score: Mark $46.5k, Britt $40.5k, Josh $27.1k, Chris $21.4k
Ratings: Mark 7.5, Britt 8.5, Josh 7, Chris 7

Steam
Time: 155 minutes
Score: Mark 39, Britt 31, Josh 30, Kenny 29
Ratings: Mark 8, Britt 7.5, Josh 7, Kenny 7

Settlers of Catan
Time: 45 minutes
Score: Steve 10, Eliot 6, Ian 5, Yarden 4 
Ratings: Steve 8, Eliot 10, an 8, Yarden ?

Giants
Time: 150 minutes
Score: Brad 138, Robert 109, Denise 79
Ratings: Brad 8, Robert 8, Denise 7.5