Final Score

And so the end of this trimester arrived. There were five of us gathered around the table in Joe’s kitchen, and while Sam’s four point lead was unlikely to be overturned, I still had hopes of getting second back from Joe, and Hannah had a chance of beating Adam for points ratio.

First course on the night’s menu was Notre Dame. This game of plague-fighting in medieval Paris was new to Sam and Hannah, so Joe guided them through the rules in his inimitable style. As we began, I was encouraged by how often my moves were matched by the game uberlord, Adam. However, like two slightly different starting points of a Mandelbrot Set, we soon diverged into distinctly different paths. I remained true to my ethos of saving lives, while Adam was happy to let the plague take its toll.

I’m not sure what tactic Sam used in this game, and I don’t think Sam is sure either. Hannah quickly saw the power of the Park, and played a tight game. Joe and Adam both loaded the park full of people, hoping to bring in the benefits of extra prestige points, with mixed results.

By the end I was unable to tell who had won. To everyone’s surprise, new boy Sam took top spot by a single coin from myself, with Adam trailing in last with his pox-ridden borough forever destined to be used by Parisian comedians when they want to make fun of something smelly and horrid.

Sam 58 +1 coin
Andrew 58 +0 coins
Joe 51
Hannah 50
Adam 39

Next up was a game of For Sale. This quick game of property speculation was new to Hannah, so Joe left it to the three of us to explain it to her while he went to the toilet. Unfortunately, Joe’s inimitable style is inimitable and we didn’t do a very good job. In the end, it was up to Joe to tell her the rules when he got back, while the rest of us looked sheepish.

Adam 60
Joe 53
Hannah 52
Sam 50
Andrew 39

Lastly, by popular request, Poison was exhumed from the bottom of Joe’s games cupboard. This somewhat random game of mathematics and luck was a perfect end to the evening, even if my game was as good as over by the end of the second round and after that it was just a case of hoping other people played as badly as me, which they almost did. In the end Joe walked away with first place, with the other four left squabbling over the crumbs.

Joe 13
Sam 30
Hannah 32
Adam 35
Andrew 36

And so the evening ended, with everyone tired, but happy. Sam’s place at the top of the leaderboard was cemented by his first win with Notre Dame, but as we realised Hannah had beaten her close rival and co-habitee Adam twice this evening, perhaps his points ratio win wasn’t so secure.

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio	Absolute	Abs ratio	% score	% ratio
Sam	30	125	4.17	1504	83.56	524.5	17.48
Joe	27	121.5	4.5	1191	66.17	422.39	15.6
Andrew	32	114.5	3.57	1077	53.85	410.31	12.82
Adam	23	111.5	4.84	731	56.23	316.57	17.77
Hannah	10	45.5	4.55	231	46.2	105.55	10.55
Quentin	9	40	4.44	132	26.4	76.92	8.55
Chris	5	20.5	4.1	137	68.5	42.64	8.53
Jonny	6	18.5	3.1	187	62.33	44.47	7.41
Steve	4	16	4	104	26	56.62	14.15

Sam takes first place, as predicted, but despite Adam ending with an evening where he came 5th and 4th, he managed top keep his ratio intact. Hannah couldn’t catch him, and a late surge by Joe couldn’t upset the form either. Sam also takes Absolute score and ratio but not if you take I’m The Boss at face value. In this case, Hannah wins by around four million points.

Meanwhile, I came first for best attendance. Yay, me.

But for next season, there’s talk of a score multiplier according to how long a game lasts. This scoring system is only getting more complicated. Hooray!

[EDIT: After Adam's suggestion of a scoring sytem based on percentage of total points scored, I hurried home and mucked about with the spreadsheet and here it is! And congrats to Adam, for inventing a new way of scoring where he wins! Sam wins the overall percentage score, but Adam takes pecentage ratio: On average, he scores 17.77% of the total scores. Meanwhile, it's a boost for Steve and puts his low position into perspective.]

[ANOTHER EDIT: I noticed I'd made a mistake in typing in the absolute scores. It didn't make any difference to the positions, but it does demonstrate the considerable lead that Sam had. And while I was mending that, it occured to me that some people played more non-scoring games, so I recalculated the average taking those into account. Which now means Chris and Jonny leap up the table in that respect. Congratulations guys!]

Wallace strikes gold in London

The final meeting of this season’s Games Night regulars has been put back until tomorrow, but Sam and I met up with a view to do a bit of writing, but we were unable to resist the pull of a new Martin Wallace game in the games cupboard.

After Yorkshire and Cornwall, Wallace turned his geographically-based historical eye to London. This game begins after the Great Fire and ends just as the first Underground stations are being built, and it's up to each player to exploit this fruitful period to their advantage. Anyone with any knowledge of the history of London will enjoy seeing the likes of Christopher Wren, hospitals, monuments and the invention of sewers being played out before their eyes.

After a quick run through the rules, we began in a feisty, experimental mood as Sam took a loan and built early while I quickly built up a large amount of cash. The game is finely balanced. Players have the option of playing plenty of cards at the same time, but risk gaining poverty squares for playing too many cards. But you can reduce that risk by building in boroughs. But that gives you more cards, which means more poverty points... Definitely a game which runs the risk of analysis paralysis.

But we both really enjoyed it. There was definitely a pleasure in watching technology progress and famous buildings being built. Or not, as the case may be. I chided Sam for not building Nelson’s Column, but on the other hand he did build Buckingham Palace. For my part, I mostly bought land on the south side of the Thames and, true to history, I built the Crystal Palace and didn’t have the underground.

It was also very difficult to tell who was winning. In the end, Sam squeezed past 79 points to 76. Definitely one to revisit, and I’m sure this will soon become a games night favourite. Whatever will Wallace’s next historical odyssey be? A game based on the suffragette movement, perhaps?

(The illustration I chose, by the way, is a new street lay out for Charing Cross proposed in 1920. I thought it would fit in nicely with the overall theme of imaginary Londons being created with each game.)

Stone Age! Where the cats meow!

One the eve of the longest day, four gamers marked the summer solstice by communing with their primitive selves in a game of Stone Age. This simple yet deep resource management game was new to Jonny, but Sam and Joe got him up to speed soon enough.

At first, Sam and I told Jonny of the wisdom of taking a field whenever possible to help with feeding your tribe. Wisdom that Joe poo-poohed, insisting there were other ways to win. And as it turned out, Joe’s poo-pooh made a surprise appearance at the end of the game.

I played my usual game of having a game plan at the start, and then immediately deviating from it the moment some easy points came up. As such, I leapt into an early lead. But I became painfully aware that everyone else was building up a healthy stack of cards while I had none. Sam stuck to his “lots of farms and a big family” tactic. And if it’s good enough for Agricola, then it’s good enough for Stone Age, right? But it did mean he was left behind in building up a presence on the scoring track in the early stages.

Jonny seemed to find his feet very fast, and I started feeling nervous that I’d end up last as he soon caught me up on the scoring track. Joe, meanwhile, played it cool, quietly chipping away at his collection of flint axes in the corner of the room.

A major feature of the game were the “party cards”, where four dice are rolled (in a four player game) whose results correspond to a particular resource for distribution amongst the players. These became very popular as people wanted an extra chance at a field/axe/gold. Joe became famous for holding great parties with gold and farms being handed out. Sam’s parties, meanwhile, usually ended with people carrying home bits of clay or wood.

Recently, I've been playing Stone Age as a two player game, so I found the four-player version quite a nerve wracking affair as I tried to guess what people would chose as I tried to work out what was best for me given what might be still available when it was my go again.

When the game ended, Joe’s poo-pooh was vindicated. He didn’t just win, he won handsomely: His collection of axes proving a viable substitute for an arable lifestyle. Perhaps this game portrayed that period in pre-history when hunter-gatherers lived side by side on equal terms with the first tribes to cultivate the land.

Or perhaps not. Either way, here are the scores.

Joe 153
Sam 122
Andrew 103
Jonny 84

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Sam	27	111	4.11
Joe	24	106.5	4.44
Andrew	29	105.5	3.63
Adam	20	100.5	5.025
Quentin	9	40	4.44
Hannah	7	34.5	4.9
Chris	5	20.5	4.1
Jonny	6	18.5	3.1
Steve	4	16	4

So as we head toward the last week of the season, it looks like only a massive collapse would scupper Sam’s chances. Joe pushes into second place, but can he bridge that 4.5 point gap in one session?

Did you say TIN MINING?

Had an idea for a game - specifically a game for gamers, who, like many of us I imagine, have been scorned/mocked/pitied for our interest. I could get all Michael Ryan about not being understood, but I thought hang on, maybe I can turn this emotional pain into hard cash?

So here's 'Did You Say Tin Mining?!', a game about games, for gamers.

Each player is on holiday for five nights (each night = a round) with their games-resistant families and friends, and their aim is to get as many people as possible around their table for a game to raise kudos (kudos being the currency of the game and the defining factor in winning after round five). At the start of each round the potential players are turned over - the skeptic, the credible, the artist, the entertainer, the child - and real players use up kudos points bidding for them. Children are the easiest to get to the table but score you the fewest points, and skeptics obviously the hardest/most valuable, as they will be scathing of the thought of playing a game with you when they could be watching Inspector Morse, or making a red pepper reduction.

The other obstacle in your path is the game you're offering - there are only as many games as there are (real) players, made up from four building blocks of design, theme, mechanic, and time - which again, are assembled at your own cost during each round. Putting together the poorly designed, nerdily themed, clunkily mechanised 3-hour marathon about philosophy that is Eureka Moments will be a very hard sell in terms of getting your family to sit down with you. Whereas the great-looking Detective! (case-solving dice-based twenty-minute game) will be an easier sell, but won't get you as many kudos points per player when you 'play' it. As ever, the game is about diversification and striking a balance - going all out for a coup de grace in family-games-conversion could win you the game, but it could just leave you with Open Derision - yourself, sitting at an empty table. Minus twenty kudos!

It's early days but I think there's something in it, don't you?

Hello?

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.

Going underground

After a fallow period, the crop of gamers harvested at this week's games night was rich indeed. But we weren’t playing Agricola tonight, so that’s the end of the farming analogies.

Seven players arrived tonight. But Joe had earlier poo-poohed any thought of Seven Wonders, insisting that as a seven player game, it simply wasn’t that much fun. Instead, we tried something new. Two games played simultaneously on the same table. I was unconvinced, but it was either that or Tsuro for the whole evening, so I agreed.

Three of us – Sam, Adam and Chris (a surprise addition after he arranged his local meetings for Tuesday) – chose Tinners’ Trail. The rest – Joe, Quentin, myself and Jonny (taking a rare break from new parenting duties) chose Pergamon, an exciting recreation of putting on museum exhibitions in 19th century Berlin! The two games chosen had a subterranean theme to them, mining and archaeology respectively.

Since I was mostly occupied with learning a new game, I’ll leave it to one of the others to fill in the details of the Tinner's Trail battle. Meanwhile, Pergamon is a new classic. The rules are simple to understand and the method of distributing money to pay for archaeological digs was very clever. Before long, we were talking like real archaeologists: "That pot’s really old," "Yeah it was a long way underground."

It had a similar feel to Colosseum in that you’re trying to put on a show, and also there’s the comic mix of serious subject matter rendered in a somewhat silly way. It’s also very fast moving, so the twelve rounds flew past. In the end I enjoyed it, despite coming last. Quentin managed to overcome his terrible start by winning lots of money in the last round. This allowed him to polish up his last exhibition and get some extra victory points. Or, as Joe put it, his last-minute buffing gave him a final spurt.

Quentin 23
Joe 22
Jonny 19
Andrew 18

(Sam takes over:) On the other side of the table we were just wrapping up the latest lesson in Winning the Hillmann Way, as Adam methodically took first place in Tinner's Trail by six points. It was an intriguing game with an awful lot of water and very unrewarding prices on copper and tin, except for the first round where clearly there was a worldwide plumbing-and-canning spree. However, because of all the water none of us could really capitalise on it, and lots of grubby Cornishmen were gnashing their teeth as they lost out financially. It was Chris' first game; but he's obviously been reading the blog as his early moves were mainly aimed at forcing the mine-building prices up for Adam and myself as a flurry of early building took place, and we then spent the subsequent rounds dashing our hopes on the rocks of high prices and soggy mine shafts.

Despite my intentions not to, I did my normal Tinner's Trail trick of finding myself with not enough to mine in round four, so I wasn't able to push my way past Adam, who had invested the most early on - and again late on, despite a quiet mid-game period. I do love Tinner's Trail, it's so easy to pick up and has so much variation in it. Final scores:

Adam 89
Sam 83
Chris 53

Then to round off the evening, we all joined together for a couple of rounds of Tsuro. Quentin only stayed for the first, but both were tense affairs in which everybody acted like people with personal space issues in a room that grows ever more crowded, as we tried to avoid each other while not running out of space. Joe was king (or should that be tsar) of Tsuro, placing first both times.

#1
1. Joe
2. Quentin
3. Chris
4= Adam/Andrew
6. Jonny
7. Sam

#2
1= Joe/Andrew
3. Sam
4. Adam
5. Chris
6. Jonny

A very good night was had by all. I enjoyed the two game set-up, because it gave people something else to look at during quiet moments in their game.

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Sam	24	99.5	4.14
Andrew	26	97	3.73
Joe	21	92	4.38
Adam	18	90.5	5.02
Quentin	9	40	4.44
Hannah	7	34.5	4.9
Chris	5	20.5	4.1
Steve	4	16	4
Jonny	3	7	2.3

Exciting times on the leaderboard, with Adam falling to fourth in terms of points scored, and his points ratio lead is looking a bit shakey too. Meanwhile, Quentin and Chris climb up a place while I close the gap on Sam. But Joe was the big winner of the evening, mending his points ratio and pushing himself into third. It's any one from four at the top of the table as we enter the last month of the season!