Board Game Session Report: Havana, Campaign Manager 2008, and Perry Rhodan

Jake and I got together for another of our awesome 2 player sessions tonight.  Although we didn't get as many games played as I had hoped they were all quite good.  I was hoping to get Havana, Campaign Manager 2008, Perry Rhodan, and Jaipur to the table and play each of the first 3 twice each.  If we tried again I'm sure we could.

Havana

Havana is from Eggertspiele and is based on the Cuba franchise.  This basis is only skin deep from what I understand.  The game has artwork from the same designer that matches the artwork in the Cuba game but other than that the games are unrelated. 

Cuba is a worker placement game where you build a tableau of buildings Puerto Rico style and is a fairly deep game.  I hear it plays quite fast though and I'd love to play it.  I actually DON'T own it if you can believe that.

Havana is on the surface a very light game.  Each player has a set of identical action cards based on different personalities.  Each card has an ability and a value from 0 to 9.  You start the game by placing two of your action cards face down.  Everyone flips up simultaneously and the cards are ordered from lowest to highest.  The number formed by the cards determines turn order.  So a 0 and a 9 are 9 and a 4 and a 7 are 47.  On each future turn in the game each player simultaneously replaces one of their two face up cards.  In this way you can have the same ability over the course of several turns.

After determining turn order each player executes their entire turn in turn order.  A turn consists of executing the two actions in any order you like and then building buildings if you want.  The actions allow you to do things like take building supplies, take money, get workers, steal from opponents, etc.  The actions are all for the goal of building buildings and preventing your opponents from doing so.

The buildings are in two rows of 6 in the middle of the table along with some building materials (colored and grey) and money.  When purchasing buildings only the buildings on the left and right ends of the two rows can be built.  The buildings all cost some combination of building materials, money, and workers and the buildings do nothing for you but provide victory points.  Each round 3 additional building materials and pesos are added to the board but the buildings are only replenished when a row is down to 2 or less.  When this happens new buildings are inserted between the remaining two buildings.  The game is a race to a certain number of points.  For the 2 player game it was 25.

The game plays extremely fast and is very fun.  The action selection is an excruciating balance between turn order and what you want to do.  The low value cards are all much less powerful than the high value cards.  If you play the two cards you want together then you will lose one of them as you have to replace one on your next turn.  There is a real feeling of accomplisment when you can pull off a string of actions where you can buy several buildings in a single turn.  Jake cleaned my clock in the first game and was doing so in the second game but somehow I came from behind for the win.

This is a pretty good 2 player game but I think it would be even better with more.  There are several cards that allow stealing from other players and a single card that protects you from this.  I think those cards would be alot more meaningful with more players.  Also there are some cards that give you a bigger benefit if you are the first person in turn order to use that action.  This was hardly ever an issue in our game as we often were pursuing our own goals and not thinking a lot about what the other person was going to play.  We did however use the action which allowed you to discard a building from the supply.  This ability and going first in turn order make for some good player screwage.  At one point I was raking in money for a high value building that cost 9 pesos and Jake stole the turn order and discarded the building.

I think this game is a real winner and I would recommend it for every taste short of the pure theme gamer.  The short play time, good player interaction, and high degree of decision making make for a balance you don't often find in games of this weight.

Campaign Manager 2008

Campaign Manager 2008 is the latest effort from Jason Matthews of Twilight Struggle and 1960 fame.  Jake and I are huge 1960 fans.  It was always clear to me that this game is much more short, light and tactical than 1960 but I had high hopes due to its pedigree. 

The game pretty much delivers.  Jake and I played with the starter decks but the game is normally a drafting game.  Each player is a campaign manager and there is an Obama deck and a McCain deck.  From these decks you create a deck of 15 cards (yes that's all) with which you play the game.  The cards are used to win battleground states which earn you points to win the game.

Each state has two key issues: defense and economy.  For each issue there are some McCain supporters, some Obama supporters and some uncommitted voters.  There is a track which shows which issue is the key issue at any point in time.  There is also a key demographic in each state.  If at any point either Obama or McCain controls all of the votes in the current key issue the state is won.  When that happens the points are awarded to that player and a new state is chosen also by that player.  When new states are chosen a media event happens which may effect that state or other states.

The cards in your deck give you voters on specific issues or demographics or allow you to manipuate which issue is the key issue or which demographic is the key demographic.  On your turn you can play a card and do what it says or draw a card.  That's it.

At first things went fast and furious and I was really liking the game but then somewhere in the middle it started to drag.  I got a bit sick of the cards in my deck and the fight for certain states seemed to overstay its welcome a bit.  By the end I felt like the game went too long and I was glad for it to end.  The tention level was not all that high and I can't really explain why.  I did like the game and I'm absolutely certain that using the drafting that the game is supposed to use in order to create your deck would add tons more variety and enjoyability to the game.  At the same time though I think the cards aren't super exciting and the 15 card deck limits the games enjoyability unless the game ends quickly.  Perhaps with practice it will but this play definitely overstayed its welcome a bit.  I'm eager to try it again in any case which is a good sign.

Perry Rhodan

Perry Rhodan is a Kosmos 2 player game which is one of the few that did not see an English translation.  I believe it is based on Merchant of Venus but I could be wrong.  I bought it on a whim a while back and was confused by the rules and too lazy to do card pasteups so it sat on the shelf for too long.  Recently I decided I would read the rules again and see if I could make sense of them.  Surprisingly the second read through showed it to be a very simple game.  Now that I have actually played it I'm pleasantly surprised. 

The game is a fairly simple pick up and deliver game with some really neat mechanics.  Each player has a space ship and an identical deck of cards.  The cards consist of technologies and interventions.  Technologies are permanent upgrades and interventions are one time events that are used and discarded.

The board is just a line of 6 planets with the sun which acts as a scoreboard at one end making a solar system.  Each planet starts with 5 goods.  The goods are simply cards with a planet on them and a value.  Cards of the same planet make a set and the cards are double sided so if any of them show the same planet as they are currently on you flip it so it shows a different planet.

Each player starts with a hand of 5 cards and a starting tech card which gives one container and one replenishment.  The container allows you to load goods and the replenishment allows you to draw a card.  You can not exceed your hand limit of 5.

The ships start on a planet chosen by one of the players.  Turns are simple.  Take one flight, up to two planetary actions, and up to two interventions.  The flight mechanism is neat.  You roll a die.  Each time you roll a one you continue to roll and add to your previous value.  So I could roll 1, 1, 3 and would have a movement value of 5.  It costs a point to move from a planet to orbit or to land and a point to move between planets.  When you are flying away from the sun its gravity hinders you and you have to stop between each planet.  So to move from the surface of one planet to the surface of the next planet out would cost 4 (take off, move half way, move the rest of the way, land).  Flying toward the sun you do not need to stop between planets so the same move going in would only cost 3 points.

Planetary actions are load, unload, and buy technology card.  When you load you need an empty container.  You fill it with any set of cards on the planet you are currently on.  Once filled this hold is sealed and cannot be unloaded except by flying to the destination planet.  When you do so you get the points on those cards.  This is the cool part.  You then flip the cards over and leave them on the destination planet.  If the cards are a pair when flipped they are discarded.  In this way new goods sometimes become available on planets and goods also disappear from the game.  The game ends when someone gets 70 points or there are no more goods to move.

Building technology cards involves playing a card to the table and paying points equal to the number of tech cards you started with.  So it's in your interest to play two tech cards on a single turn because they are cheaper that way.

So a typical turn is to roll the die, pick up goods, fly to a destination if you can, and drop off goods.  Sometimes you can't get to your destination in one flight.  The tech cards are pretty simple and that's a good thing.  They do things like give you an additional movement point, more ability to draw cards, more containers, and some more drastic things like the ability to hyper jump long distances.

The intervention cards do some really neat things.  Some give you points for dropping off passengers, some let you do one time jumps, some allow you to swap cargoes with your opponent or swap ship positions from your opponent or even load goods from planets you are not on.  Your opponent can prevent the effect of a card by discarding an identical one.  This is a great tactical addition.  Very neat.

This game was completely excellent.  I can't believe Rio Grande did not automatically produce an English version as they do with most of the Kosmos 2 player line.  Luckily ZMan has picked up the rights and will produce it in 2010 sometime.  This is a game everyone should have.  It is fast and simple and highly tactical while managing to integrate theme very well.

Conclusion

This was a night of 3 new games where all of them were pretty excellent.  Of the three games Campaign Manager which was quite good was actually the worst.  The other two could seriously occupy my hot 10 for a while.  Perry Rhodan is like the anti-Lost Cities in that it really wears its theme well but is still a game with a lot of control.  Havana is helped quite a bit by its excellent production, although I'm not sure the bits deserve the price tag I'm seeing.  My copy was $18 because it is in German and I bought it after the English edition came out but I'm seeing online prices of around $30 for the English which means a list price of $40+ which is pretty absurd for this game.  I think Eggert might be smart to replace the building tiles with cards at some point and sell this game as a $25 retail card game.  In any case I would recommend picking Havana up.  The game has that certain something.  It doesn't seem like it should be so enjoyable but it is surprisingly awesome.

I'll be playing all of these games again as soon as possible.  I think even Mrs. Metroburb would enjoy these.

Thoughts on Game Groups

As we approach the 2nd Anniversary of the 2.0 version of the Metroburb Gamers I have been reflecting on the gaming personalities in the group.  This stems from a couple of things.  The first is that despite my desire to get as many games as possible to the table to justify my expenditure I am far more interested in having a happy group who looks forward to playing every week.  Yeah I know, everyone has an off week from time to time but for the most part gaming is recreation in its most literal form for me and I hope it is for everyone else in the group too.

I expect that some of the members will comment on this thread since I'm writing it without telling anyone.

Metroburb 1.0
The first version of the Metroburb Gamers was created when I first started getting into euro games and needed some regular players to get together with.  I had no idea how to seek these people out but a close friend of mine at work, Stan, liked RPGs and played Settlers occaisionally so we would play games during lunch or right at the end of the work day before going home.  Gradually we involed two other people at work.  Geoff 1.0 and the notorious Alex (Axel Boddington).  Stan later told me that Richard, an honest to goodness German guy, who Stan, Geoff and I had all worked with at a previous job, was looking for some people to play board games with.  Richard was also an RPG and occasional CCG player.

Thus the first incarnation of the Metroburb Gamers was formed.  We had a rough time getting together regularly that first year.  People would often cancel at the last minute and the meeting would collapse like a house of cards once one or two people cancelled.  So I would call us a pretty bursty group.  We would meet consistently for a few weeks and then cancel repeatedly for several weeks in a row.

As a group we had a pretty good mix of personalities and tastes.  Richard's tastes tend to run toward the pure German games.  He appreciates a well integrated theme but I notice that he gravitates toward games that are pretty Knizia-esque.  Stan is a very smart guy who was a frequent winner in our games and was pretty open to playing anything but he actually tended to actually like some really chaotic games.  Stan works a lot and was a frequent no-show.  He is still on the mailing list but hasn't played in the 2 years since the new incarnation of the group was formed.  Geoff 1.0 was also a great guy.  He had a very open mind about games and enjoyed pretty much everything.  He was an extremely deliberate player though, so much so that we started calling taking a long time to play "Geoffing", a term which we still use today despite Geoff having left us for the left coast years ago.  Alex tends to like light games with a ton of theme.  He is the odd man out in our group I think but he happily plays most games.  The one exception is Ra which he hates with a passion.  This was the group we had, on again, off again for a couple of years then it really fizzled.

Metroburb 2.0
There was a long hiatus when I was playing mostly by forcing games on my family and my wife but I bumped into my friend Jake who I have known since High School and I decided to take a shot at inviting him to games.  Jake is up for pretty much any form of entertainment and readily accepted.  I can't remember whether his first session was with only me and Alex or only me and Richard but it went really well.  Not only that but Jake was reliable in a way that no one in the group had ever been before.  Now it was very easy to have at least 3 players every week and most weeks 4.

This group was what I would call the kernel of Metroburb Gamers 2.0.  Somewhere along the line, giddy with the great Jake success, we invited Jay, another long time friend, to play.  Jay is super busy and doesn't make it a lot of the time but he always makes the big events and is good for a session every now and then.  The last piece of the current group fell in place when I changed jobs in late 2008 and met Geoff 2.0.  Geoff has the broad taste in games and right competitive attitude for the group and is also a super nice guy.  Geoff is also pretty reliable which solidifies the group even more.  Geoff has moved away for the time being but we hope to have him back in a few months.

Your Game Group
So there are a few things to discuss after this long introduction.  What makes for a good game group?  What is the right size for a group?  What is the right mix of player types?  What are some fun things you can do to keep the group coming back and keep things fresh?

Taste
For me a good game group is one that is open to trying new things and only competitive enough to try to win.  Any group competitive enough to care alot about losing is probably too competitive for me.  Since I buy a ton of games I also need a group that is pretty open to being taught new games week after week with only a few exceptions.  My group is really good about this and we're pretty honest with each other about how we feel on any given night.  Since we meet mostly on week nights we will just fire off an email saying "Rough day in work today.  Let's just play stuff we know tonight." and that is readily accepted.  I like the group we have right now because we're all friends.  In some ways I use games as a way to get together with people where you can actually talk (as opposed to a movie or something) and where you can not spend tons of money and get fat by going out for food and drinks all the time.  I think this is one of the main benefits of games to me.  It is a reason to get together.  That said I do think we should probably do more non-game activities in the group since our friendship is starting to revolve more around games than anything else.

Size
The right group size is a painful thing for me.  I like having 4 and sometimes 5 people the best but I also like the occasional 3 or 2 player night and once in a while I really wish we had enough people to play 7 player games.  I have thought alot about expanding the group for this reason and I'm conflicted about it.  The problem is that I usually host at my house and I don't think I can fit a group that is frequently 7 or more players.  Part of me wishes for 7 or 8 players at every session so we can have two tables going at a time but I don't know if that works in my house.  The other problem is that I'm afraid if the group grows to 8 regulars we will frequently be stuck with 6 which I think is a pretty bad number for most games.  If anyone is reading this I'd love for you to comment on the size of your group and how it works.

For those who are members of the cult of the new what is the right ratio of new to older games during your sessions.  We only play once a week and for only 3 hours or so.  We are lucky to get 3 games played.  If we play a longer game and also have to learn the rules we are often exhausted at the end and have to call it quits which results in a single game session.

How frequently should a group meet and should you try to mix in weekends and weeknight meetings?

Events
Another thing I like is that lately we have been having more gaming events.  We throw a small party with dinner and games when Geoff visits lately.  At least one of those is probably going to become a regular event.  We played the three big box Ticket to Ride games last year and that was great fun.  I think that event will recur.  I'm hoping over time to build up a portfolio of these things and keep the best ones.

I've also had game nights where significant others were invited.  That isn't the way I want to game all the time but I've had great fun with it.

This year I'm thinking about a whole day gaming event on Cape Cod.  I'm going to call it Cape Con 2010...  I'm sorry but that one was just too easy.  I'm hoping people can either come down on a Friday night and game all day Saturday or come down on a Saturday morning, game all day, crash, and then invite significant others and kids or whathaveyou down for the following day.

I think I need to stop rambling for now but if anyone is reading this please leave a comment and let me know what your group is like and what you like and don't like about it.  I'd love some suggestions.




What does your group do to make things more memorable?

Board Game Session Report: Candamir and Metropolys

Metroburb headquarters has been quiet lately. Last week's session was canceled when I ran into trouble at work just minutes before heading home to host. This week Richard couldn't make it but we did manage to cobble together a rag tag band of 3 heroes and get two unplayed games off my list.

Candamir
The games on tap were Candamir: the First Settlers and Metropolys. Candamir is a Kosmos/Mayfair affair from the esteemed Klaus Teuber. The game is in the Catan Adventures series and I have had it since the day it came out in 2005 (US version). Right after I got it the game was getting such a bad reception they issued new tiles with more stuff on them to make the game go faster and be more fun. I have these tiles but used the originals with the game last night.

The game is a pleasant enough affair. The components are typical nice Kosmos quality with a decent board divided into a map section and a village section, several wooden bits, cards for goods and ingredients as well as adventure cards and movement cards, player boards and personality cards, and cardboard tokens for goods found in various landscapes and to trick out your character with experience and items.

The game plays to 10 victory points like any Catan game and you track this by playing out your pool of 10 cubes throughout the course of the game. The cubes are placed when you either make an item for someone in the village or find an animal in the landscape for someone in the village. The game has only a two real turn options. You either adventure on the map trying to get to a tile or you stay in the village and trade in cards for items for your character or for the villagers.

At the start of your turn you can trade but there was very little need or impetus for trade in the game. You can then look at two tiles in the field and either choose not to travel at all or to go to a board location including either the tiles you looked at or any other location.

When you travel you use a deck of cards. You can turn as many cards as you have stamina points. The cards all show four directions corresponding to the orthogonal directions for your player piece on the map. Some directions have nothing and other directions show a picture of an ingredient or an encounter. The three ingredients can be used to make healing potions, mead, and potions that help your abilities in encounters. The encounters are skill tests which can either be depicted directly on a card (snake, bear, wolf, etc) or can be a "?" which means you can choose from the 3 face up adventure cards from the adventure deck. Each person has a character board with 4 skill numbers on it. An encounter is a simple matter of rolling a die and adding your base ability score to it. You win on ties or higher. You get the ingredient or have the encounter by moving in the direction of that picture. Even if you lose an encounter you still get to go to the space. Your turn doesn't even end as long as you still have stamina enough (after losing one for the lost encounter) to keep moving. When you win an encounter you usually get something like a hide for killing a wolf. If you get to your destination you get the tile and go back to the village. If you don't you keep going to the destination on your next turn. The tiles have experience points and items on them. Experience points are for improving your skills and items can improve your skills, or be goods like wood, stone, and hide, or items which also improve your skills. Your character card also has two special abilities that can do things like let you find hidden items or go one move farther in certain terrain.

When you choose to stay in the village you do a Settlers-style build by trading in cards. When you trade in ingredients you are brewing potions and drinks that help your character. When you trade in resources you can buy items which means that you put a VP cube on a spot matching that good. You can build swords, chests, and window coverings... wierd. There are villagers in the village that want lists of these things and also animals. You may only give them the top thing on their list so if no one currently wants a sword you cannot make one. Animals are simply found in the field on tiles. There is also a longest road type mechanic where once someone gets 3 or more cubes in certain villager's lists they can place an additional VP cube in a bonus area. It stays there unless someone outdoes them. There is also a bonus for encountering the most adventure cards.

So what's to like about this game? Well it is nice to look at and has some fairly neat ideas. I like the character boards and attributes and the movement deck. The settlers build and especially the trade mechanic really doesn't add anything to this game. In fact the entire experience is lackluster. For the first 20 minutes or so I was saying "this isn't great but it's relaxing and pleasant" but that opinion slowly devolved as the game went on and it was clear that it was mainly a luck driven game without a lot of theme or fun to keep it moving along. The mechanics used would have been far better with a fantasy or space exploration theme. As it is this game basically models the drudgery of pioneer life as a board game. You go out, collect random plants and resources, bring them back and make boring things. You encounter drunks and snakes. Not very interesting. When you add this boring theme to the lack of strategic or even tactical decisions in the game and compound it with the longish play time of almost 2 hours (lets say 80-90 minutes for experience players) I think you end up with a pretty disappointing game.

And that is what this is: a game with some good ideas that is ultimately completely forgettable. I didn't love Talisman when we played it but that game created a story of sorts that made up for its lack of control and decision making. In Candamir you have a few decisions and you are never simply stuck and frustrated but the game doesn't manage to satisfy and does not create a memorable experience through either its game play or its theme. With a huge game collection this game is immediately on the sell/trade pile.


Metropolys
It was getting late and Alex was showing signs of flagging but Jake and I urged him on to play Metropolys. This is a Ystari game from Sebastien Pauchon. The group really likes Yspahan and from the same publisher and designer we had high hopes.

The game is a simple positional auction game where you have different value buildings and you bid for a location by placing a building. The auction works by the players following the start player adding a higher number building to a location adjacent to the previously placed building. This goes on until people all pass or can no longer bid. At that point the only building that stays on the board is the winning building. This building stays on its location turned number side down and the winning player starts the next bid from anywhere. That player also gets to pick up any token on the final building plot. Most tokens are good (subway stations and trendy neighborhoods) but some represent encountering an archeological site which is bad.

You repeate this process until someone runs out of buildings and the game ends. You gain points from the tokens you collected and from building buildings in an area that matches a goal card you received at the beginning of the game. I need to say that we played the family game which has simpler goal cards and no tallest building bonus for each district.

The game was easy and fast and decently tense. The board is really nice to look at but not so great for helping you see the spaces. The building pieces come in only three heights so once they are turned over it is hard to remember if someone has used their 1 or their 5 for something. That adds something to the game. The game is a pretty abstract experience where you can really think out your turns both in terms of board position and trying to discern what your fellow player's needs and intents are. It may in fact have been too abstract for me. We each had at least one situation where we made a placement that seriously setup another player to be able to play several of their low pieces in a row. That makes me think you cannot play this game as fast as I would like to nor treat it as lightly as I think it deserves. As a result it's a bit of an enigma to me. I seemed to have enjoyed it for aspects that will disappear when played properly by experienced players. I want to move to the Experienced player variant for a few plays and judge it after that. For right now I think it's at least a keeper if not a top notch game. My experience may change that opinion.