I walked into the game room this morning and was lucky enough to find a game of Struggle of Empires that was starting and needed a player. Woo Woo! Our game group has the occasional day of playing long games. However, they dont play long games and
refuse to play Struggle when I suggest it. So I was glad when I had this opportunity. This game lasted around 4 hours which pushed me to 2pm without eating lunch! I enjoyed playing it while being hungry which should say something about the game.
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Caylus is definately the popular game of the con. There were three copies in play during all four days. So I am sure that everyone got a chance to play it. And I was lucky again to have walked up to the table when they were looking for another player.
For right now, the reputation seems to be well deserved. There are lots of interlocking rules. During your play, there are tough choices to be made. And there seems to be many different paths to victory.
In this con, I have met many new people and have had a chance to play in different group dynamics. In my normal gaming group, people can be taken at their word (except for Mike) and deals are binding. However, in this game, one player decided to screw
me over. You see, I took a chance to spend three coins to help protect my position. I did this because this would allow Red, the next player, to protect two of his positions for three coins. I thought that it was a fair proposal which Red accepted.
Unfortunately for me, he decided to screw me over and not protect his other piece (which would have protected my piece). But what was great, was that the next player decided to spend a coin to go back to the original position. Which ended up screwing
Red twice and myself once.
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This was another game by Jeff Widderich. He was at the con demoing his games and when I walked by, he grabed me into this game. This game is about saving peasants before the Pompei volcano wipes out the town. Your final score is the number of your color tokens
that you save times the number of other color tokens that you save. The problem for me with this game was that apparently the designer felt that explaining the full rules would take too much time since there were some special exceptions that usualy
doesnt happen. What he did instead was start the game with new people and explain the rules as the game progressed and the special tiles came into play. The problem that I had with this was that I got no strategic sense for the game. I was only making
tatictal decisions based on advice from the designer.
In this game, I was rather lucky. I was able to save a lot of people. I also had a number of opportunities to screw other people. This probably left a bad taste in the other players’ mind since they too did not understand the strategic game but they
had bad luck and lost the game.
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This was another short game by the same designer. And fortunately for us, it was basically four player chess with shuffled pieces that were introduced one at a time. Which gave the game an interesting feel to it. I would definately play it again.
In this game, I was doing pretty good. I was attacking Jon’s queen. The designer was in a little trouble. And the third player was slowly building up his defenses. Unfortunately for me, the designer was the first to loose the game by checkmate. When
this happened, his remaining pieces were taken off the board. This immediately exposed my queen to be taken by the third player (who moved next). After that, the third player had a queen, a rook, a bishop, and two knights. Jon and myself had far less
than that. So we called the game. This would be interesting and challenging with good chess players.