Sushi Express

For the first game of the night, we broke out another new game from Adam Spielt. This one could handle the six players and was supposedly a light filler game. So, I read through the three pages of rules and we were off playing. This is a push your luck game of sushi delivery. However the sushi theme is non-existant. For example, you want to collect different types of customers but it would have been more thematic for them to be different types of fish for the sushi. Anyways, the mechanics are of the push your luck variety. You start out picking a number from 2-12 where you think that either you will roll that number (out of two attempts) or the people on higher numbers will roll for their number. Once a number is made, all bets that were on numbers that are less than or equal to that number can move. And when you move around the board, you can collect a customer. Halfway around the board is a park, where you can collect an action card which will give you special abilities. And Adam figured out that in a six player game, who ever bets on the 7 will move to the same place after lapping the board. And he used this to always go back to the park and collect an action card. Which effectively broke the game. We tried to get him off of that position by taking the 7 spot before he could, but he just played another action card to go onto the same spot. Of course, 7 is in the middle of the choices, so he would usually move after other people had moved. This gave up some good unique customer card choices for himself.

Gods x 2

Another new game from Adam Spielt. This time we played the limited reprint of a downloadable game from Michael Schacht. It took us a liitle bit of time to figure out what the translated version of the rules were talking about. And after we got through the rules, we still had questions and thought that something was missing. That something turned out to be the correct version of the rules! So, I downloaded the new version for the new game and we figured everything out.

This is a game where we are trying to convert 4 tribes of followers to our religion. The players are gods after all. There are two choices of tiles that are drawn from a bag and it costs us action points to place the tile. Strong tiles that can convert many worshipers at once will cost many action points to place. Weaker tiles that can only create one follower for you cost less action points to place. Then there are less usefull tiles which are mainly used to block other gods from stealing your worshipers. These actually give you an action point to place.

In the first game, we misplayed that discarding a tile meant out of the game (where it should have been back into the draw pile). This was used to hose people since they would discard opponent’s strong god tiles out of the game (many of mine were). We also noticed that this game was reliant on the “luck of the draw”. If you were lucky and drew tiles that created followers for you, then you were on your way to winning the game. Otherwise, there was not much you could do except shake your head and curse fate. For the next game, we played so that we refreshed the tile selection after every draw and not at the beginning of a turn. This would give you a little more of a chance that a useful tile would show up. Well, I won both games but it was because I had the better luck (or fate). I think the rules need another tweak.

Carolus Magnus

Doug brought out a game that I haven’t played in a while. It is a good three player game but the constant stream of new games hurt its chances to be brought out to the table. Unfortunately, I started off badly. Doug was in the lead and John was in second. And also unfortunately, John was attacking me instead of attacking the leader. I could only hold it off for a few turns before I finally set Doug up for the win.

Mu

People still didn’t want to leave for the night. So we played a few hands of Mu. Not for points, but just for practice.