Antiquity

Ed and Susan held another gaming day and the group made the long trek up north. Susan wanted to play Antiquity. Jon and myself eagerly jumped in. Paul volunteered to play as well. After explaining the rules, we jumped in. I started out strong but then bogged down. I was playing a little too conservatively and not pushing my economy. In this game, if you do not have enough food, you take graves. These graves take up spots and can disable buildings. But you can man a hospital to remove the graves. So it is only temporarily punishing once you bring enough food to meet the demand. It is definitely a balancing act where you want to efficiently use your workers. I tried out the forced labor building. But I wasn’t that efficient in using that building either. When Jon announced that he could win the game in two turns, I scrambled madly. And it was at that point that I realized that I could use the market to get the goods I needed to also win the game. Doh! I already had one winning condition with Santa Maria. It then came down to a tie breaker. So we carefully counted unpolluted areas in our control. And I pipped Jon for the win.

Paul was definitely having problems in this game. He wasn’t bringing in enough food to keep ahead of the famine level. So he started taking graves. When it was clear that he was going to lose the game, we allowed him to remove all of his graves and ignore further ones. Next, he realized that he was out of wood. In this game, it takes wood to make more wood. So we gave him a couple of freebies. Unfortunately for this game, the first game that you play is a learning experience. Your goal is to stay alive during the game. And you can’t hope to win your first game unless everyone is is a newbie too.

Die Säulen von Venedig

Ed brought another new game to the table. This one looks like it has interesting bits and a bit of theme. But it also has some problems. There are cards that give you abilities and, from a hand of five, you select one, simultaneously reveal it, execute it in turn order, and then pass it to the player on your left. You do this until you run out of pylons. The cards are (generally):

• Take control of the gondolier. If a building is built on the river, then you score points.
• Take pylons and mark some of them as owned. Buildings are built on pylons. If you build on a pylon that is owned by another player, you still score all of your points, but, the other player scores three points for each of their pylons that you use.
• Take buildings from the stock. The builds come in different shapes and victory points that they generate.
• Perform the action that someone else has performed during this turn.
• If someone plays a certain type of card, then you get six points. There are three types of cards that correspond to three of the above actions.
• You can pick a person and spy on them. Take one of their cards and give them something else.
• You can cover marked pylons and not give those people any victory points. Ouch.

The problems in this game is the simultaneous reveal and guessing what others will do. Since you must build your buildings on pylons that someone has placed, another person can take up the only spot on the board if they build before you. Another problem is the power of the start player. They get to pick a person and randomly take a card from them. Another card from your hand is given back to them. Ugh. Also, your actions are limited to what cards you have in your hand. So if people upstream play cards that are not beneficial to you, then those cards are going into your hand. You must keep an eye on this during the game.

I made a couple of mistakes during this game (after post game analysis, of course). I got second place though so I wasn’t too upset. Ed probably hates me because I picked on him once during the game (there was a choice of two places to cover and not give any victory points to players).

Perikles

Ahhh, I have been dying to try this game out. And Jon was nice enough to enable me. Susan also wanted to play it to decide if she wanted to buy it.

The only problem was that I played this game past my bed time. So I made a major mistake in the final round. Ugh! And when I got home and went to be at 12am, I woke up four hours later and couldn’t get back to sleep. Major ugh!! I have noticed that my sleep cycle is highly fragile… Still, I had fun playing it. And want to play it again.

Another sad thing is that our gaming group do not like many Wallace games. They like Age of Steam, Volldampf, maybe Tempus, and possibly Liberté, but do not like Struggle of Empires, Byzantium, Empires of the Ancient World, Perikles, or Princes of the Renaissance.