Eminent Care of Manhattan Java
I covered the voting and special event portions of our 5th Anniversary party last week, but never got around to actually talking about the games I played, so here's my attempt to catch up on that...
Eminent Domain [BGG]
David and Michelle were there last week for the first time in a long while, and hopefully some changes in their schedule will allow them to return to us more often. After catching up for few minutes, I recommended that we play Eminent Domain, which they had missed completely in their absence. Sean also jumped in at the
last minute to fill out the player capacity.I chose to go all Warfare, and got a little lucky early on in Surveying into 2 Prestige worlds. I started off like gangbusters, but then (as you often do) got a little stalled out in the mid game. I wanted to do a little more researching, but realized that it wasn't really going to happen in the shortness that is the 4-player game, so I just tried to power through and do my part to run out the Warfare stack while Sean took care of the Research track and Michelle cleared the Colonize cards.
Despite researching a few level 2 Techs, Sean couldn't put together much of anything else to score points. David had done a few points of trading to get a little closer to me, but I still pulled out the very low-scoring win.
Time: 44 minutes
Score: Norton 20, David* 15, Michelle* 12, Sean 12
Ratings: Norton 8.5, David 8, Michelle 7, Sean 9
While 4-player may be my least favorite way to play Eminent Domain (because there's so little chance to build up your "engine"), I still like it a lot. And I think that everyone else had a good time as well, so hopefully I'll get to play it with David and Michelle (and Sean, of course) again sometime.
VivaJava [BGG]
So then on I went with the playtesting portion of the evening. Specifically, I wanted to try out the "Intern Inspansion" variant that makes VivaJava playable with 3 & 4 players (since it was originally designed for 5-8 players). It didn't go very well because I though that I had totally broken the game, but later found out that the rules surrounding a couple of elements about it had already been changed based on other recent playtests, so my input was less valuable than I had hoped it would be.
Time: 70 minutes
Score: Norton 33, Keth 24, Tom 11
Ratings: Playtest
VivaJava is right in the heart of its Kickstarter campaign, and if nothing else gets you to check it out, how about this?
Acute Care
From there, Keith and Tom both wanted to give Acute Care some playtesting love too. It went pretty much like the other recent ones have, which is mostly good. The first half of the game always feels really tight and exciting, but then near the end, once you've discharged or otherwise gotten rid of a number of patients, it gets a little too easy.
The cool thing is that I think we did a pretty good job of identifying a few particular cards that need to be changed or removed, and a way to tighten up the whole game some by tweaking the starting patients a little.
Time: 37 minutes
Score: Nurses (Norton, Keith, and Tom) - 6, Acute Care - 2
Ratings: Playtest
If nothing else, though, I'm pretty happy with the timing of the game right now. It really does seem to model the course of a real day on a nursing unit. Plus, it looks to be in that 30-45 minute range pretty consistently (with 3 players at least), and if I do say so myself, seems to pack a pretty good punch both of tension and difficult choices into that amount of time.
Now I just need to actually write down the rules sometime soon...
The Manhattan Project [BGG]
To finish off the evening, we played another of MInion Games' new games, The Manhattan Project. Several of us were really excited about the theme of the game (the race to create "The Bomb"), and I was pretty blown away by how cool it looked as well.
Basically, it's a perpetual-motion worker-placement game, where on each turn you either place a worker on the board (and as many of your own buildings as you want), or you pick up all of your workers. You have to collect raw uranium ("yellowcake"), turn it into enriched uranium or plutonium, construct buildings, research the bomb, build and maybe test your bombs, and still keep money flowing somehow to finance everything. Plus, the game has some really cool interaction both indirectly (blocking spaces on the board and timing when you do certain things) and very "in-yer-face" ways (like bombing their buildings and deploying spies to use them for yourself).
As you would imagine, there's quite a learning curve going on, and in general, we all seemed to spend too much time building up our infrastructure rather than converting over to actually making bombs (which is the only way to get victory points). I was really the only one who invested time and effort into messing with someone else (I bombed two of Sceadeau's buildings), and that seemed to definitely give me a little advantage over him in the end game. More than anything else, it gave me a little advantage in timing, both to choose the bombs I wanted to create and then to get them built just a turn or so before he would have finished his and won.
But everyone seemed to have a pretty good time with it. Tom was actually the next most aggressive, and while he wasn't in the position to win immediately after I did, he had made more actual progress than anyone else up to that point.
Time: 86 minutes
Score: Norton* 49, Tom* 31, Sceadeau* 29, Kenny* 0, Matt* 0
Ratings: Norton 8, Tom 7, Sceadeau 8, Kenny 7, Matt 7
There's a lot of game here for 86 minutes of play, particularly since I think we all realized that we were probably wasting at least some time, and it was just our first play. While there's not necessarily "multiple paths to victory" here (since you have to build bombs to win, I do still think that there'll be a lot of room for choosing which mechanisms in the game to most engage with to do so. I had a lot of fun with it, anyway, and I'm really grateful for Minion Games passing on this as a review copy. Hopefully, I'll be able to get in a few more plays sometime soon and write a full review.
The little worker dudes are just so freaking cute!
Other Games Played
Ascsnsion: Storm of Souls
Time: 70 minutes
Score: Sean 95, James* 77, Shawn 56, Stacy* 51
Ratings: Sean 10, James 9, Shawn 10, Stacy 8
Blood Bowl: Team Manager
Time: 50 minutes
Score: Rory* 47, Alton 44, Mark* 35, Matt* 29
Ratings: Rory 8, Alton 9, Mark 8, Matt 8
Carnival
Time: 60 minutes
Score: Stacy* 4, Sean 2, Shawn 1, James 1
Ratings: Stacy 9, Sean 8, Shawn 9, James 6
Dungeon Petz
Time: 104 minutes
Score: Sceadeau 76, Ian 48, Chris* 47, Kenny* 47
Ratings: Sceadeau 1,000,000 (not an approved rating, btw), Ian 9.5, Chris 8, Kenny 8
Lancaster
Time: 55 minutes
Score: Matt 74, Mark* 62, Shawn* 55, Ian 50, Alton* 25
Ratings: Matt 8, Mark 7.5, Shawn 7.5, Ian 8, Alton 8
Launchpad 23 (Looney Pyramids game)
Time: 25 minutes
Score: Sean* 4, Shawn* 1, Stacy* 1
Ratings: Sean 7, Shawn 5, Stacy 5
Pastiche
Time: 65 minutes
Score: Michelle 53, Chip 38, Brett* 34, David* 32
Ratings: Michelle 8, Chip 8.5, Brett 8, David 7.5
Sentinels of the Multiverse
Time: 37 minutes
Score: Heroes (Chris - The Visionary, Jay - The Wraith, Matt T - Tempest, Sceadeau - Bunker, Darren - Fanatic) - Win; Omnitron (on Wagner Mars Base) - Lose
Ratings: Chris 8
Stone Age
Time: ??
Score: Chip 173, Alton 154, Stacy 126, Ian 91
Ratings: ??
Strausburg
Time: 46 minutes
Score: Sceadeau* 75, Matt* 48, Chris* 44, Ian* 22
Ratings: Sceadeau 9, Matt 8.5, Chris 8.5, Ian 9
Thurn and Taxis
Time: ??
Score: Chip 21, David 19, Alton 17, Michelle 16
Ratings: Chip 8.5, David 9, Alton 10, Michelle 7.5
* First play for that Person
Related Articles at GamerChris.com:
Eminent Domain Review
The Hypermind Boardgamers Turn 5!
Keith: Do you ever get that "not so fresh" feeling?
Tom: What? You too?
Posted by Chris Norwood at 2/2/2012 4:44 PM 
Categories: Gaming Weblog, Hypermind BoardGamers
Tags: Eminent Domain VivaJava Acute Care The Manhattan Project
Categories: Gaming Weblog, Hypermind BoardGamers
Tags: Eminent Domain VivaJava Acute Care The Manhattan Project
Comments