Before they arrived, Sally, Stan, Joe and I all performed an impressive feat of fireworks in Hanabi, scoring 20 points with minimal (and inadvertent) cheating. I say minimal: we did give our clues in a very dramatic play/don't play manner, which might be against the rules I guess?
Anyway the Eastern theme continued as Sally and the boys went off to watch Thor: Rangnorak and we set up Dragon Castle.
This is a tile-taking-and-placing game that is slightly reminiscent of Azul, in that what tile(s) you take dictates what tiles are available for others. Score points for sets (bigger the better) during play, and points for shrines (higher the better!) at the end of the game - play is something of a trade-off between these two options. I've played this a lot in January, and my prep fortunately held up:
Sam 45
Ian 41
Andrew 36
Although hats off to Andrew for refusing no less than two proposed do-overs, instead preferring a philosophical sanguinity. Starting something of an evening meme, we agreed that Martin would 'probably' quite like it. BUWMLI (But would Martin like it) score: 3/5
Next we set up Beta Colony: in Earth's distant future, humanity escapes into the cosmos in order to play a massive Stefan Feld game.
It involves dice (move/do actions!) fuel (manipulate dice) resources (pay for actions!) and artifacts (build stuff!) as we hurtled around a vast rondel in space like children on a spinning roundabout, making ourselves giddy with Euro excitement. We added in spacey music, starting off with Brian Eno - Andrew broke the mood by identifying the long, atmospheric ambience as 'Brian Eno's doorbell' - and then Vangelis, as we hoovered up resources and spent them building futuristic space pods, or not so futuristic buildings like, weirdly, Big Ben or the Sydney Opera House. It was very Feldy in the mechanisms, with agonizing decisions and plenty of 'oh shit' moments. But not Feldy at all in the scoring, which was quite refreshing. Ian moonwalked his way to a fairly convincing victory - we lost the scores but agreed it was something along the lines of:
Ian 62
Sam 56
Andrew 52
Not so much a battle, or even a settle, as a puzzle. We liked it! BUWMLI score: 1/5
Although we'd established Ian as leader of Beta Colony only shortly after the kids retired (albeit past their usual bedtime) everyone felt like a silly luck-pusher to shake things up a bit. Andrew brought out Las Vegas, and as well as the silly luck-pushing there was a fair amount of screw-you placement as well, with at one point several casinos giving out nothing at all, so balanced were the dice in them.
although not on this occasion
Ian was doing so poorly in the second round it looked like a straight fight between myself and Andrew, but he surged back in round three to claim an improbable and spectacular victory!
Ian $310k
Andrew/Sam $270k each
Fortified by both alcohol and reckless abandon, we broke out our third new game of the evening in Troika, one of those Oink publications that come in neat, tidy little packages. We went through the simple rules and were off!
In Troika there are tiles numbering 1 to 15, with three of every number bar the 7 - there are seven 7's. You shuffle the tiles face-down as an 'extraction zone' and imagine yourself spacepeople landed on a distant planet (so far, so Beta) gathering tiles either to make gems (a run of three tiles) or fuel (three of the same number). The value of the gems is the right-most number of the highest tile: so 1-2-3 is three points whereas 9-10-11 would only be worth one point. You need fuel to get off the planet - without it, you can't score your gems.
On a turn you flip a tile over and then have a choice: take a face-up tile into your container, a face-down tile into your hand (maximum of three in your hand!) or return a tile from container or hand to the extraction zone. That's pretty much the game, although you can declare yourself out of the round by shouting Troika! and the first person to do so scores a bonus five points: which can be huge in this game, where the winner of a round (ie highest value gem total) only gets 2 points! Second gets a point - third gets minus a point!
This simple affair had us marvelling at how delightful it was - tactical, luck-pushing, and a little bit nasty in places. I emerged the victor in a tense third round as I called Troika before anyone else before the second time:
Sam 3
Ian 2
Andrew 1
BUWMLI score: 4/5!
And with that, Saturday night drew to a close: nice games, nice company! Cheers guys.
I really enjoyed tonight. Dragon Castle was like a multi player version of solitaire mah jong and I might have done better if I'd followed the NMBR9 rule of going up early.
ReplyDeleteBeta Colony was fun in a kind of "never enough time to do what you want" way. It looked complicated at first but turned out to be fairly straightforward once you got going. Get stuff, build stuff, score points.
But Troika turned out to be the star of an already stellar evening. So simple and yet so full of opportunities to screw over your neighbours while risking screwing yourself by mistake. A real find.
Thanks guys, it was a delight.
Your BUWMLI rating was correct in that I preferred Troika to Dragon Castle but I think I'd put both a notch lower. I found DC a bit lacking in teeth compared to Azul and Troika was fun but no better than a host of little card games. I'd play either again though!
ReplyDeleteDC is certainly less combative than Azul. Troika just seemed to hit all the right notes on this particular evening - played on the subsequent Tuesday it was still fun, but no fireworks. Odd.
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