This Tuesday didn't start out so well.  I awoke at about 4:30 with a scratchy throat and gunky, throbbing sinuses.  I struggled through the day, went to the doctor to get some antibiotics for my blossoming sinus infection, and then took 800mg of ibuprofen to make myself feel decent enough to attempt a game night appearance.  Because, by goodness, with all the distractions of being a husband and a father, I'm not going to willingly give up one of my precious game nights without one heck of a fight.

So anyway, as I walked in, a game of Race for the Galaxy with the new Rebel vs. Imperium expansion was in progress.  Britt and Mark were also tucked away in the back corner playing Blood Bowl.  I hung around for a few minutes until some others rolled in and the RftG game wrapped up.  We then divided into two groups and played Stone Age in stereo.

Stone Age

It had been a while since I played Stone Age, our Game of the Month! for July, so I went over the rules pretty carefully to make sure that we all were up to speed on it.  Everyone knew how important the civilization cards are, so along with the love shack (and its accompanying soundtrack), agriculture, and tools, people were gobbling up the cards from the very beginning.  I managed to get my agriculture up to a decent level early on, and picked up a good number of builders (which give a bonus for each completed hut).  Even with that, I ignored actually building huts for a while, instead building my tribe and collecting tools.  In the midgame, I switched to building at least 1 and sometimes 2 huts a turn, which alone launched me into the lead.  With an agriculture level of 4 and a tribe of 8, I was able to limit my hunting to every 2 or 3 turns (depending on whether or not I picked up some food from civ cards or not).  I also picked up a couple of tool makers, one priest, and 2-3 farmers from other cards.  

Josh was all about expanding his tribe.  He was the only player to max out at 10 tribe members, and with the 6 priests he had, that was 60 points added to his score at the end.  Kenny focused on gathering sets of culture symbols and managed to get all 8 different ones for the big 64 point payout.  Adam worked hard all game to collect resources and poured them into the "generic" huts (where you could use any resources and got points based on their value), so he did really well during the game play, but didn't have a lot of multiplier bonuses to add to his score in the end.

In the final tally, my lead from all the huts during the game, added to the builder bonus and the other miscellaneous scoring cards that I'd collected, helped me to push past Josh for the win.

Time: 88 minutes
Score: Me 199, Josh 156, Kenny 141, Adam 113
Rating: Me 7.5, Josh 8, Kenny 9, Adam 7

Stone Age is definitely looking up for me.  Especially compared to the initial impressions I had for it, I'm definitely seeing more potential.  For the game to really work, however, there must be heavy competition for the civ cards.  As long as they are being evenly distributed, the game is really solid.  If one player is allowed to dominate or cherry-pick the cards he wants, however, they will win by a mile.  And that points a little to one of my qualms with Stone Age, that it is a little too dependent on the cards.  

And since players must always be scrambling to get ahold of cards, it can also be hard to really pursue any one specific strategy in the game.  Of course, there are lots of different paths to get VP's, but it would be very difficult to walk into the game with a preconceived plan of pursuing hut-building and tools, because there is no guarantee when the builder or tool-maker civ cards will appear, or that you will be in the position to get them when they do make an appearance.  Instead, Stone Age is a lot more about being tactically opportunistic with the choices and scoring paths that present themselves, and then being as efficient as possible in pursuing the opportunities that you choose.

The other thing that bothers me a little is that the game continues to be a little too long for what it is.  If it were firmly in the 45-60 minute range, I'd be thrilled.  But at a consistent 80-90 minutes, I don't necessarily feel like there's quite enough fun or depth to sustain my excitement.  We'll see, though, my opinion still has time to change one way or the other.

Clans

My diseased head was already feeling drained after just the one game, but I wasn't quite ready to give up the ghost quite yet.  Alton suggested Power Grid, and I knew that I would rather gouge out my eyeballs than suffer through 2 hours of that drudgery, so I declined.  Kenny and Chris joined me and I pulled out Clans.  

Clans is actually one of the first eurogames that I ever bought.  Back before I really jumped neck-deep into the hobby, I saw it on the "Staff Recommends" shelf of a FLGS that died years ago.  I've played it a handfull of times in the past, and while it's always been enjoyable, the experience was never quite inspiring enough to make me really excited about it.

So anyway, we set the game up, I took the 3 minutes or so necessary to explain it, and then we played.  There's not much to report about it: we moved huts around, we made villages, I made a move that pretty much gave away which color I was playing (destroying a village that contained all colors except mine), and Chris made the last village which pushed him past me for the win.  

Time: 19 minutes
Score: Chris 46, Me 42, Kenny 39
Rating: Chris 8, Me 7, Kenny 7.5

Again, Clans is a solid little multiplayer abstract.  With the hidden player colors, the game can be a little chaotic at times, but it's got some nice strategy and plays very quickly (set-up takes almost as long, in fact).  I'll probably tote it along for the rest of the month (since it matched the Stone Age theme), but my opinion hasn't really changed about it.

Fairy Tale

I hadn't played this little card-drafting game in forever either.  As I was teetering on the edge of leaving, I figured that Fairy Tale would be just the light filler I needed to be able to leave game night satisfied.  All of us had played before, but Kenny especially was pretty rusty.  We played 2 games with the basic rules, but then threw in the advanced cards for the third game.

Time: 12, 10, and 9 minutes
Game 1: Chris 30, Me 30, Kenny 27
Game 2: Kenny 39, Me 33, Chris 31
Game 3: Chris 54, Me 41, Kenny 40
Rating: Chris 8.5, Me 7.5, Kenny 8

It was a little weird, but I didn't get any real "multiplier" cards in the last two games.  In Game 2, I had 2 Dragon's Lairs and 2 Fairy Rings (which are 6 points each), and then in Game 3, I completed 3 story cards and had three of these 6-point cards.  But in both cases, I was beaten out by someone else that managed to put together sets of the multipliers.  For its time commitment, Fairy Tale is a really solid game, and I need to get it to the table more often.

   
Other Games Played

Race for the Galaxy: Rebel vs. Imperium
Time: 14, 24, and 24 minutes
Game 1: Chris 38, Alton 12
Game 2: Mark 60, Chris 30, Alton 27, Josh 13
Game 3: Alton 52, Chris 46, Mark 44
Rating: Chris 10, Mark 10, Alton 10, Josh 7.5

Stone Age
Time: 66 minutes
Score: Chip 152, Alton 147, Carol 141, Chris 108
Rating: Chip 9, Alton 9, Carol 9, Chris 7.5

Power Grid
Time: 120(ish) minutes
Score: Adam 11 (+$150), Chip 11 (+$119), Britt 10, Alton 9, Carol 7, Josh 7
Rating: Adam 8, Chip 7.5, Britt 7, Alton 9.5, Carol 8, Josh 7

Blood Bowl
Time: 105 minutes
Score: Mark 2, Britt 1
Rating: Mark 8.5, Britt 8

Atlanteon
Time: 17 minutes for 2 games
Score: Chris - 2 wins, Carol - 0 wins
Rating: Chris 8, Carol 4

And in addition to our normal cadre of gamers, we also had some other people who came by and played a few games.  Specifically, they played a couple of Fluxx games and then a marathon (freaking 140 minute!!!) game of Munchkin.  And the amazing thing, from my perspective anyway, is that they all had an absolute blast!  In fact, the 5 players involved in the Munchkin game rated it with an average of an 8.9... and yes, that's still on a 10-point scale! 

To reflect just a moment, the strange thing is that not very long ago (just a few years, really), I probably would have been right there with this group of people, loving every drawn-out minute of the Munchkin-a-thon.  Mainly, it was because I would have been thrilled just to get any chance to play pretty much any game.  And on top of that, my overall expectation of boardgames and their rules was so low that I figured to have a good time, you pretty much had to "bring your own fun" to the gaming experience anyway. 

In a lot of ways, that mentality also ran over into role-playing games, because the traditional style of RPG's tend to only supply you with the "physics" of the world you're involved in, and all of the actual "role-playing" part of the game is the responsibility of the GM and players.  In fact, many groups tended to ignore all or part of the ruleset, or just hack and house-rule it to pieces to get the game experience that they really wanted. 

But now that I've been introduced to these modern/euro-influenced boardgames and the indie/storygame RPG's, I'm afraid that I've become a game snob.  Of course, a more positive spin on it is that I've just become infinitely more discerning.  Either way, I'm just not willing to accept playing a game that is incomplete, lazy, or mediocre... especially with all of the other options available in this hobby.  Because, let's be honest, a game like Munchkin is just a lazy design.  Instead of making the gameplay itself stimulating and replayable, they keep churning through expansion after expansion, setting after setting, trying to keep fresh with new fluff a game that has some of the most stale mechanics that I've ever played.  

I don't know exactly where that little tangential rant came from, and I really didn't mean to bad-mouth Steve Jackson games as much as I did, but reading over the report from that Munchkin game just got me thinking.  Anyway, I need to get some other stuff done, so I'll be back when I can...


Britt playing Power Grid... From intense analytical anxiety to total cerebral breakdown.