Thoughts on Chicago Express

Aside from a lack of motivation and vacation one of the main reasons for the having 0 blog posts in the month of August is that the group has widely caught the Dominion bug and Dominion games don't really make for interesting session reports.  

I think the group's enjoyment of Dominion, even among the people who never buy games, is very exciting and something to be encouraged.  Hansa Teutonica lit the fires of the group quite a bit too but not to the point of anyone running out and buying it to play at home.  It is very satisfying when we can play a game that rises above the feeling that we are all just playing games to hang out for a while or because Matt has all these unplayed games he has spent a ton of cash on and wants to play.  It's a good thing and I hope it can happen more.

Along with this you may have noticed that the old classic Acquire hit the table a few times recently.  Given this fact I thought perhaps the group was ripe for another rules-light, fast-playing, economic game, so finally we had a chance to play Chicago Express,  a game that has been gathering dust on the shelf for a long time.

The Queen Games production of Chicago Express is a thing of beauty:  a beautiful board with dials, stock certificates and nice paper money (usually one of my biggest pet peeves in a game but it just feels right in this game), and lots of wooden trains.  Added to this is the rule set which is so succinct that I had no problem teaching it to the oft-impatient metroburbers, and a playing time that clocked in at just over an hour on our very first play making this game something very special indeed.

The premise of the game is simple.  There are several rail road companies you are going to invest in and grow in order to make the most money by the end of the game.  

Each company has a unique and limited number of shares to buy and trains to build routes with and the game will end when 3 of the 4 companies either have no more trains or no more shares, or when there are 3 or less improvements to be built, or if Detroit is completely built up.

Each person begins the game with some cash and one of each company share is auctioned with a unique starting bid to begin the game.  There are so few shares that this initial auction phase has affects the entire game thereafter.  Each company has an initial offering price and bids escalate until all but one bidder has dropped out.  That person pays his money to the company (not the bank) and takes the share.

It is this money that will be used throughout the game to build routes and improvements on the board thereby raising the income of each company and increasing the dividends which in turn provide you with the income that is the victory condition of the game.  There is no final selloff of the shares so the dividends you earn throughout the game are your only route to victory.

Already you can probably see that the stage is set for some serious gaming here.  Let me recap.  The money used to buy the share goes to the company.  Anyone with shares in that company can use this money to build train routes or improvements to raise the company income.  So by buying into the same company as someone else you are forming a sort of alliance with them whereby you can both work to improve the state of the company to increase your fortune.  You can also just try to go along for the ride which can be very frustrated for the other investors.  The variation in the number of shares in the companies (from as little as 3 to a max of 7 shares) means that in a game of 5 players there will be a few people who do not have an interest in 1 or more of the companies.  It then becomes a challenge to figure out how to compete with these people when they can co-operate to push that company to great heights.

I should probably return to telling you what your turn is like.  Each turn you can either auction a share, extend a company's routes on the board, or improve the board.  Building routes costs money from the company coffers and is limited to 3 hexes per turn, improving a space does not cost you anything but you can only add one improvement per turn to the board.

When you auction a share the auction is the same as the initial auctions in the game however if no one bids on the share it simply goes back to the company rather than going to the auctioneer.

When you expand a company's route you must pay the amount specified on the board in order to place a wooden train there.  It's very simple.  Also certain spaces can have a train from each company on them while others once occupied cannot be entered by another company.  To perform the action you simply add up the cost in each hex, pay it, and put the trains down.  When you enter certain areas the income of the company increases as well.  This is also printed directly on the board and you simple move the company income marker up by the total.

When you improve or develop a hex you simply put a wooden house on the hex which adds to the income of all companies present on the hex.  If you develop one of the industrial cities they can be developed several times and the income will grow each time.  Forest hexes provide cash when developed instead of a an income bump.  To develop any location at least one company must have a presence there but you need not own an interest in that company (I think you'll want to though).

Each time you do any of these actions you move the corresponding dials on the board.  When two of the dials are in the red zone at the beginning of someone's turn a dividend happens before the turn occurs.  During the dividend each company's income is distributed to its shareholders evenly.  It's that simple.  Then the dials are reset and the game goes on.  Detroit is also developed automatically when dividends occur.

It is important to note that you may choose an action and not perform it.  This has the effect of pushing the dials toward a dividend and not changing company incomes, improving the board, spending company money, or potentially giving a rich player a shot at a company share prior to a dividend phase.

Not doing this killed me at one point in our game.  I had a majority of shares in one of the companies and decided to auction off another share which I lost and which subsequently watered down my interest in the company when a dividend occurred immediately afterward.  Boo!

One part of the game I won't go into in too much detail is that when a company reaches Chicago a 5th company Wabash enters the game and a special dividend is payed to the company that reached Chicago. This is a really big deal in the game and Richard trounced us using it.

Anyway that's pretty much the game.  The game is fantastic.  There's cooperation, and competition happening simultaneously all the time and a constant balance between spending money on shares and to finance the railroad you want to succeed and saving money for the game end.  The game is so simple to understand and so hard to play well because of all the elements that it's just wonderful.  It's also EXTREMELY FAST and looks fantastic on the table.  

I give Chicago Express a 9 and with further plays it might be one of my few 10's.

Session Report - Glen More, Wasabi, Small World

Freshly back from vacation I really wanted to start getting some unplayed games to the table.  I really wanted to give Glen More a shot and I recently acquired Wasabi and Boomtown second hand.  Given that Glen More is slightly heavier than the latter two I thought it was a good combination.

Alex was running late due to problems with the trains in Boston and we were only slated to have 4 for the night anyway so Jake , Geoff and I sat around and talked for a good while until the arrival of Lord Boddington.  Given how long we should have played some filler games but it was nice to just shoot the breeze too.

New Games
I've been binging pretty hard on games lately after a long period of time where my buying patterns were almost that of a normal person who is really into board games.  Among the new games in the collection waiting to be played are Founding Fathers, Defenders of the Realm, Thunderstone Wrath of Elements, the expansions for Nefertiti and Saint Petersburg, Dominion Alchemy, and World Without End to name just a few.  Hopefully I'll have something to report on all of these games in the coming weeks but for now I can tell you about two other games: Glen More which is new-ish and not available in English at this time and Wasabi which is new to me.

Glen More
Glen More is an Alea game that I remember hearing about back in the Essen time-frame I think which makes it not so new.  When it popped onto the new games in stock list at Game Surplus I snatched it up thinking it had been released in English but was surprised when it came and was the German edition.  I guess I should have been tipped off by the price of $28 which is high for an Alea small box game.  The game is in the same box as Witches Brew.  I don't recall whether there is a smaller Alea box than this or if games like Palazzo and San Juan are also in this box size but anyway I digress.

The theme of Glen More is refreshing.  You are a Scottish clansman who is building your village and earning prestige by making whiskey and sending chieftains to parliament.  The game is not deep in its theme and is very much a game from the German school of games but I still found the theme nice and the game is full of interesting mechanics.

The game has quite the kitchen sink of mechanisms but when all is said and done manages to be pretty simple to play.  In the game you will find tile placement, a sort of rondel for choosing tiles combined with a turn mechanism where the last person on the track is always the current player a-la Thebes, resource production and trading with a market, building powers, and several interesting scoring mechanisms which are really the most intriguing part of the game.

The game consists of tiles which are displayed on a track and are used to build your village.  The tiles all give you some benefit in the form of clansmen, resources, victory point generation, or special abilities.

Everyone starts with a village tile with a clansman meeple on it.  The village tile also has a river running in one direction and a road in the other direction.  Each turn you move your meeple to the tile you want to take and place the tile as part of your village.  When placing the tile must be adjacent to a space with a clansman on it (either orthogonally or diagonally which is nice) and you must not violate the flow of the river or the road.  There are no bends in these and they will simply form a straight line vertically or horizontally throughout the game.  Some tiles do not have either of these features and may be placed anywhere that does not block the river or road.

When you place a tile the tile activates and all the tiles adjacent to it (including diagonally) do too.  When this happens you get the ongoing production benefit of the the tile whether that is producing a resource or turning resources into points or whathaveyou.

The scoring is cool.  There are 3 scorings during the game when each of the 1, 2, and 3 stacks of tiles run out.  The scoring is for whiskey, parliamentary chieftains, and special buildings and the score is based on the differential between your score and the lowest score.  So you get the most points when you have alot of something and someone has none of it.  It behooves everyone to try to stay competitive in all of these categories to keep someone from running away with the game during the end of round scorings but going after these scorings when you see your opponents are not is a valid strategy.

Other ways to get points mostly include activating point-generating tiles.  These are tiles that allow you to trade in resources for points.  You can get the resources from your tiles or from the market.

The market is another interesting aspect of the game.  There is a market for each type of resource with three available slots.  To buy a resource you put coins in the next available slot if there is one and take the resource.  So the first resource will cost 1, the next 2, and the final resource of a type will cost 3.  Once all 3 slots have money on them no one can buy that resource without someone selling one.  When you sell a resource you simply take the stack of coins from the highest slot.  You are not allowed to buy resources when you don't need them so there is no way to starve people out of the market artificially but it happens anyway.

Some special buildings give end of game bonuses and coins count for one point each at the end of the game as well.

But here's the real killer.  At the end of the game you lose 3 points for each tile in your village above the number of tiles in the smallest village!  In our game Jake kept jumping ahead on the tile track (which by the way is not recommended because he had very few turns as a result).  Because of this everyone else was taking about 3 turns for every two of Jakes.  In the end it looked like Jake had lost the game by a mile but because his village was so small I lost 18 points (16 tile village to Jake's 10), as did Alex, and Geoff lost 12.  In the end Geoff won because of that while the whole game seemed to be looking like I would run away with it.  You are allowed to take a tile you cannot place and discard it as a turn and perhaps I should have taken this option a few times as I was definitely taking tiles I did not need when the opportunity to take extra turns arose.

In the end I don't think the group liked the game much but I really thought it was excellent.  I'm hoping for a repeat with a shorter play time due to knowing the rules (which really aren't difficult at all).  The game is fiddly though.  Sometimes you place a tile and it activates lots of interesting other tiles and you are allowed to resolve the tiles in any order you like mixing in visits to the market for buying and selling so resolving your turn can be a chore to watch sometimes but it's fun when you are on the receiving end!

This game is a 7.5 for me and I can see it hitting 8 after a few plays.

Wasabi
Wasabi is a game I have considered picking up multiple times before but have begged off because at its heart it is an abstract game and I'm not fond of that type of game.  But the game is an unbelievably awesome production with great art work and neat menus and little wasabi bowls so I've always sortof still wanted it.  Recently it popped up in someone's for sale pile for $15 and I just had to have it.  I'm glad I did because it's a fun light game.

I won't do a full rule run through on this post but basically you are trying to place sushi ingredients on a board so that they form rows which fulfill recipes that you draw.  There are action cards you win as bonuses when you complete recipes and you get extra points for completing the recipes in the order they appear on the recipe.  Each recipe earns you points and when the board is full the person with the most points wins.

I had fun with the game but it was pretty chaotic with 4.  I would like to play this with 2 or perhaps 3 to make it a bit more predictable but it's a really cute little game and it looks fantastic on the table.

I wish publishers would start putting stuff like this game into smaller boxes.  I know other people don't have the game buying problem I have but standardizing on standard box dimensions and generally squeezing more game into less box is something I would really like to see in the future.  I would like to see no box larger than the Agricola box (except for games with tons of miniatures) and I would like to see a lot more games in very small boxes.  I don't mean to pick on Wasabi because there is a heck of a lot of stuff in the box whereas some boxes are really nothing but air.  But Wasabi is such a light game I think it should take up less space on my shelf if possible.  They could even make the ingredients and board smaller to achieve this and it would not lessen the game experience.

Small World
Geoff and Alex were dragging by the end of this second game (our throughput is never what I hope it will be) and decided to take off but Jake the ubermensch was still up for more.  I was borderline so I thought a good compromise would be a game of Small World on the iPad.  This was a perfect solution.  If not for the iPad I would probably have just called it a night because I didn't feel like setting up and cleaning up a game.  With the iPad we banged out the whole game in less than 20 minutes.  Oh and I won which never happens.  It was a pretty boring game for the most part though.  Around turn 6 I picked up the Amazons and somehow Jake never managed to push them or my first race off the board much so I just left them there fully distributed, earning 10-14 points per turn until the game ended.  I won  111 to 98 or something.

I recently bought the Tichu app and I'm hoping to learn the game from the AI.  I did that with Mu which is another game I could never figure out from the instructions.  I'm really liking the games for this reason.

I have heard the Medici app isn't great which is too bad.  I'm still waiting on Ra and I'm cautiously optimistic about Samurai.  I have both Money and High Society and like them a lot.  I do wish these games would have dedicated iPad versions.  Oh and I hate the trend toward selling add on expansions after you buy the core game app.  I have avoided Keltis for that reason... and because it's an iPhone app.

At some point I need to blog about Keltis Orakel which is by far my favorite Keltis variant and is so good I intend to order it from Germany at some point.  This game is fantastic!

Ok that's a rambling post but I was feeling guilty for neglecting the blog for so long.  Now go play some games!

Session Report Catch-up T minus 3 Sessions: Hansa Teutonica, Alea Iacta Est

Wow it's scary how fast time goes by.  I apologize for being out of touch for over 3 weeks.  Rest assured games continued to be played while nothing was being written or added to the blog.  I know it's small consolation when you've got nothing good to read.

Let's turn back the clock to 3 sessions ago when we had 5 players including the recently returned and ever-regretful Geoff 2.0 for a session involving Hansa Teutonica and Alea Iacta Est.  I've blogged about both of these games before so I'll stick to the session.

First Hansa Teutonica is a brutal game with 5 players.  I was choked out of many of my strategy avenue.  For the first time I chose to spend time building up my skills, and owning some of the Kontors in key skill cities.  This did win me quite a few points during the game but I ended up missing connecting my two biggest trade networks by one route.  This lost me several points.  I was also one bonus token away from maxing out my bonus token points which alone would have tied me for the lead.  So given another one or two turns I could have tied or won the game.  This has happened in almost every game I've played of HT and it is no small part of why this is a great game.  Everyone is in the running right up to the end and everyone is either trying to accelerate to the end of the game or delay that end to their own benefit.

In the end the game was a tie between Alex and Richard and I was in second place.  Alex was thrilled because there is no tie breaker and if there's anything Alex could possibly like better than player screwage during the game it would be drawing a game with Richard when there is no tie breaker.  Richard is infuriated by games with out infinite tie-breaking ability.

Another thing I noticed about this game is that I'm pretty certain that everyone missed some Kontor points at one point or other.  We need a better system for scoring those when trade routes are completed: either the direct understanding that it is the responsibility of the person scoring the route, or the person owning the Kontor, or a designated third party.  During the game we often had the "Did you give me points for that?"  "I think so... Maybe not"  or "Oh I already gave myself the points.  Did you give them to me too?".  Anyway in a game where the scores are so tight and the game end is so dependent on these points we need to pay more attention.

When we wrapped this up I brought out Alea Iacta Est.  We played this game a while back and liked it well enough.  Check out that session report for a description of mechanics.  Unfortunately it was so long since our last play that I had alot of the same problems with this game as before.

Namely this:  the game is mechanically light but has many elements which require a deep familiarity with the game in order to enjoy it for the light dice roller that it is.

This is both a blessing and a curse for the game.  On the one hand if you played this game say 5 times in 5 weeks, you would start to remember a few key things about the game.  One is the composition of the people: colors, values, male or female.  This is important to know because you have to put the people in to a location to gain any points from them.  Conversely you need to know the color mix of the places, duh.  The last think you need to know is the effect of the various senate cards.  The thing that makes this game drag with new players is that the senate cards, some of them in particular, have some pretty unintuitive behaviors and in order to select one you need to read a paragraph of text on a cheat sheet.  To do this for several cards each round really slows down the end of the round.  Also the iconography doesn't really help your understanding in most cases.

The upshot of this is that this game is unique in that it really is a dice game with meaningful choices and strategy within the confines of the randomness of the dice and the shuffling of the people, locations, and senate cards.  The only question that remains is "Is it worth getting over the hump with a game of this weight?".  In this case I think the answer is yes.  Experienced players can reduce the play time of this game to that of a true filler and for a game of that length this game has a really compelling strategy to fun ratio.

But in general I'd love to hear the opinions of readers on this subject.


Here is the scenario:  


You play a game that shows signs of a really interesting light game but your first play was a slog that took twice the listed play time.


You realize that if you play the game a few more times you'll get over the hump and might be rewarded by a very solid fast light game.


What is your reaction?


Do you want to play it again to get over that hump or do you walk away?  


I'm of two minds on this.  On one the one hand games of this weight should usually not have this high activation energy associated with them.  In a way they have failed as a filler if they require several plays in order to become the light games they really are.  On the other hand you might be denying yourself a really nice high-density-filler game experience if you apply this logic universally.