Water, water, not exactly everywhere . . .

Earlier this week, I listened to the latest episode of Ryan Sturm and Geoff Engelstein's excellent Ludology podcast - about the 'why' of gaming. The current episode focusses on complexity, and introduced a concept I was unfamiliar with: cognitive load.

Cognitive load is the amount of rules and concepts games require you to hold in your head whilst playing. This is distinct from rules which, once learned, quickly become second nature, and you don't have to keep them at the forefront of your mind, and can focus instead on strategy and tactics.

Games which induce a heavy cognitive load will tend to appeal only to hardcore gamers, and be a big turn-off to casual players: Troyes would fall in to this category, I would say, along with Brass and De Vulgari Eloquentia. Games like this often require a player aid, a reference card to help manage the amount of stuff that the players need to assimilate. It doesn't mean they're bad games, but they require an investment of time and effort to learn.

And then there are games that, despite a simple ruleset (and thus a light cognitive load) nevertheless involve a mind-bending set of choices, as you attempt to wrap your brain around the future consequences of your current actions.

Santiago, which we got to play last night for the first time, is one of these.

We were five altogether, Sam hosting Adam, Andrew, Jonny and me.

Santiago is about irrigating crops, and bribing the canal overseer (one of the players) to send the water the way you want it to go — as it says on the box, 'the water flows where the money goes'.

It also says on the box '60 mins'. It took us two hours, not including ten minutes learning the rules at the beginning.

The rules themselves are simple, but the decisions that result from them are rather deep, and often agonising. Do you bid high for the crop tile, and leave yourself little money to bribe the canal guy?Do you bid low to become the canal guy, in the hopes of raising some cash? Do you offer up a big bribe to the canal guy, forcing him to take it rather than spend more of his own precious money sending it his way, only to find that someone else has made a lower offer that benefits the both of them?

It was everybody's first game, which probably accounts for the long play time. Sam, Adam and Jonny made an early alliance involving bananas, while I planted a small potato field, and Andrew, the first canal overseer, bided his time.

In the second round, Adam took an aggressive stance, shutting in my potato field, and Sam threw in his extra canal to keep his bananas moist, which meant easy pickings for the winners of the crop auction going in to round three.

No-one had a total grasp of what was gonig on, but Adam seemed increasingly relaxed (always a bad sign), and by the end, although no-one could quite tell how where they stood, we all sort of knew Adam had the win.

It's a game in which you can, if you're so inclined, crunch the numbers on your turn and have a pretty good idea of your optimal move. That doesn't come naturally to me, I prefer going with my instinct. Andrew was of a similar dispostion, and we came 4th and 5th respectively. Johnny was third, Sam second and Adam won comfortably, having pushed in to the hundreds. Tellingly, the scores were fairly evenly spaced, with 40 points between first and last place:

Adam 105

Sam 90

Jonny 84

Joe 74

Andrew 65

I liked it and would be happy to play again, though I don't think I'm very good at negotiation games. That said, there's a fair amount of transparency — unlike some games, it's relatively easy to figure out what represents a good offer in terms of return.

After that we played TransEuropa — the game lasted four rounds I think, each round someone falling short by four or five points. I think Trans Europa is a great way to round off a games night — I find it quite addicitve, despite the limited amount of strategy. there's a lot of luck, but it does seem to reward attention to your opponents placement. JB

Joe 1st

Jonny 2nd

Adam 3rd

Andrew 4th

Sam 5th

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Sam	26	106.5	4.1
Andrew	28	102	3.64
Joe	23	101	4.39
Adam	20	100.5	5.025
Quentin	9	40	4.44
Hannah	7	34.5	4.9
Chris	5	20.5	4.1
Steve	4	16	4
Jonny	5	16	3.2

Ersby reports: Just six points seperate fourth from first as we galavant to a grand finale. Despite a poor performance by me, I cling on to second spot.