As soon as I walked into game night on Tuesday, there was a spot waiting for me in a session of Stone Age. My good buddies held the game in anticipation of my arrival, even turning down another player or two that tried to get into it. That was a really cool way to start the evening for me...

Stone Age

So anyway, as the game started, I was late in the turn order. For whatever reason, no one else seemed very interested in growing their tribe/family, so I practically lived in the “love shack” all game long. I therefore fell into a strategy based on family and priests, and I planned to do all that I could to collect artifact cards to supplement my score.

Chip, our eventual winner, had the same goal of collecting artifact cards and generally had the better position and opportunity to get them. He therefore racked up the 64 points for a full set of eight, while I only picked up 4 cards for a measly 9 points. Alton and Chris focused on constructing huts, and for the first time in my experiences with the game, the endgame was triggered by running out of one stack of huts rather than by depleting the civilization card deck.

By the end, my tribe was up to 10 members (the maximum), and my 5 priests scored me 50 points. Unfortunately, it only helped me to finish in third place. But it also prompted several jokes made about chaffing, dehydration and other such things regarding my frequent visits to the baby-makin’ hut, and I got the chance to sing along with the B-52's as I blared the Game of the Month! theme song a few times.  Alton did a little better at Chris in implementing the hut-building strategy, putting together some additional scoring to push him into second.  And while I don't remember exactly what else Chip did to beat the crap out of the rest of us, it worked well enough that it wasn't very close.

Time: 46 minutes
Score: Chip 149, Alton 125, Me 120, Chris 85
Ratings: Chip 9, Alton 9, Me 7.5, Chris 7.5

The first thing that stands out to me is that the game only took 46 minutes, which is about half as long as many of our previous games (and about a third as long as the other session played this week).  Of course, this was probably the most experienced group as a whole with the game, and the game ended earlier than normal due to huts rather than civ cards.  Heck, if Stone Age was always this short, I think that I'd like it a lot more.  To me, it also highlighted one of the weaknesses in the game, but I'll wait until my review to get into what I think in detail.


Tales of the Arabian Nights

As soon as we were done with Stone Age, it seemed like a done deal that Tales of the Arabian Nights would hit the table next.  The three of us who played last week were eager to give it another go, and we were joined by two new players as well. We knew that playing with 5 would push the game up to around 2.5 hours (since from our experience and reading online it seems to take about 30 minutes per player), but we were willing to go ahead with it anyway. 

I reprised my role as Sindbad, but unfortunately, my story was not quite as successful as it was last time.  After seeing how Story points seemed easier to come by than was Destiny, I set my initial goals at 14 Story and 6 Destiny.  But for me at least, Destiny was even harder to come by, and I only managed to get up to 4 Destiny throughout the whole game.  With his bad luck as Ali Baba last week, Chris made a radical change and played the female character Scheherazade, while Chip took up control of Ali Baba.  Brett kept Ma'aruf and James gave Aladdin a go, hoping that he would meet Robin Williams in the process.

The 120-150 minutes of the game were great, but then we all got a bit squirrelly; standing and moving around a lot and just hoping that someone would go ahead and win already.  The actual encounters were very entertaining for the most part, especially when we'd run into one that had multiple stages.  For instance, to get one of my goal markers, I had to head up to Ireland.  While there, I encountered some angry mermen.  I tried to talk and bargain with them (since I had Bargaining and Evaluation as a skill), but all I did was piss them off and they sunk our ship.  I floated around for a while, but my innate sense of Magic (since that was another skill I had) led me to some kind of crazy portal that transported me to the Burning Lands, one of the places of power.  I boldly charged into a gathering of Efreet, demanding to see their leader, then proceeded to slay him to death and be honored by the rest of the convocation.  That was pretty cool.  But of course, later in the game, I was put into the brig of a ship and couldn't get out for 3 or 4 turns, so I must of just had a really good day with the Efreet.

Chip did really well, and literally maxed out both his Story and Destiny scores (20 each) throughout the game.  Unfortunately (for all of us), he also picked up the Envious status, which prevents you from winning as long as you have it.  He decided to trade it for On Pilgrimage (which is one way to get rid of it), but you can't win with that either until you finish your trek to Mecca.  As it turned out, he also met the other conditions to lose Envious before he got there, but it only made a turn or so difference because you have to be in Baghdad (the "City of Peace", according to the game board) to win anyway.  The presence of these statuses definitely extended the game the extra half hour or so that it ran over our projected 2.5 hour expectation.

By the time that Chip finally got to Baghdad and triggered the end of the game, Brett was just about to accomplish his goal as well, and while he hadn't quite maxed out both tracks, he did manage to complete his goal in the final round and was also eligible to win the game.  The first tiebreaker is number of statuses, but they were tied with 3 each, so it came down to the second tiebreaker (number of skills), where Chip edged Brett out by just one or two skills and took the win.

Time: 193 minutes
Score: Chip - Win; Brett  - 2nd; Chris, James, and Me - Not Win
Ratings: Chip 7.5, Brett 9, Chris 8.5, James 9, Me 8

Obviously, 5 players is too many for Tales of the Arabian Nights.  In fact, it really seems like Z-Man didn't expect more than 3 or 4 to play at once, because they didn't provide enough of each skill token for more than that to have them at once.  It seems like it would be best for 2-3, but I could also see it being fun for 4 or solo play as well.  But I doubt that I'll play it again with 5 (unless we lowered the story/destiny goal to less than 20) and 6 would be totally ridiculous.  Of course, I could imagine that 6 players could actually play together if they had two copies of the Book of Tales and Reaction Matrices.  Since only three people are involved in each encounter (the encounteree, reader, and matrix dude), you could conveivably have two encounters taking place at all times, which would be crazy and chaotic, but probably a lot of fun.

Again, Tales of the Arabian Nights is not a game that you really care about winning.  All of us knew that going in, and apart from dragging on a bit at the end, we had a really great time.  I love the game, and want to continue getting it to the table quite a bit over the forseeable future. 

I will mention one other thing, however, and that's the "time of day" markers that relate to the character encounter cards.  The rules say that you don't change from Morning to Noon until you have run through the Encounter deck one full time, and then don't go to Night until after you reshuffle it a second time.  Even in our 3-hour, 5-player game, we only ran through the deck once and used only 4 or 5 encounters during Noon.  I can't imagine ever running through the deck another full time (I think we'd all be clawing our eyes out first), so it feels like the Noon and Night encounters will almost never be used.  I wondered (and plan to try out next time) if it would be better to divide the deck into three parts and running through one full day (Morning, Noon, and Night) in one pass through the deck.  The only complication in this would be if the Noon and Night encounters are harder or more deadly, but I don't know that it would matter in the game either way.

Other Games Played

Age of Empires III: The Age of Discovery
Time: 120 minutes
Score: Britt 67, Steve 60, Alton 59, Daniel 55, Ken 46
Ratings: Britt 8, Steve 7.5, Alton 9, Daniel 8, Ken 7

Big City
Time: 42 minutes
Score: Carol 126, Michelle 88, Mark 79
Ratings: Carol 7, Michelle 7, Mark 7.5

Race for the Galaxy
Time: 15, 17, and 15 minutes
Game 1: Artificial Intelligence 51, Chris 23 (solo game)
Game 2: Chris 57, Alton 36
Game 3: Chris 40, Alton 32
Ratings: Chris 10, Alton 10

Stone Age
Time: 113 minutes
Score: Britt 171, Michelle 140, Carol 138, Steve 124
Ratings: Britt 5, Michelle 8, Carol 7, Steve 8