Muddle Management

Feast or famine: after last week's bumper crop of gamers, we were suddenly down to three. But moving the venue to Martin's meant we could coax a tired Ian out to join the host, Adam H and myself. We kicked the evening off with another new one of Martin's: Big Boss. 

This is a curious thing: what looks like a score track is actually a shared board where companies are established: a mix of financial heft and physical geography. Players have numbered cards that can be played to establish (in the early game) or develop - ie make larger - companies along the track. When you do either of these things, you collect cash equal to the current worth of the company, and may also buy shares. At the end of the game, players compare share value (and cash) and the richest wins.

We begin with a hand of cards and on a turn can either play one as above, or pay $5m to get an extra card. In addition to that, players have the option - at a cost - of adding a 'radio tower' to a company, meaning that they now own three additional shares in it. Where the game gets interesting is the shared (or not) incentives of development, and the unknown aspect of who has what cards. I found myself improving Ian's share ownership in Lunar several times when I picked up cards of numbers I had no kinship wth. 

early game

mid-game

As companies grow they will sometimes come into contact with each other, and this causes a merger. The bigger company subsumes the smaller one and suddenly there's a vast behemoth where once a Mom and Pop store sold you homemade sandwiches. Martin and Ian were the significant beneficiaries of these corporate takeovers, whereas Adam and I less so. But Adam still managed the inscrutability of the game rather well, and only a late-game error shunted him into third (as well as boosting my score into a more respectable fourth).

1 Ian $610m
2 Martin $565m
3 Adam $563m
4 Sam $510m

I struggled a bit making sense of it all, and I think we all felt the second half of the game was an improvement on the first: it significantly sped up and things got more interesting. 

late game

Next up was a new one of mine: Sardegna. Actually it's a reskin of an old game (Kreta) but packed into a tiny box that unfolds to become the board: quite a neat little device. Over 11 rounds we contest for control in different regions of the island, which we do by playing cards to add forts (influence all surrounding regions) villagers, priests, boats and villages (influence the region they're in). Everything has one influence except villages, which are two.

An array of region cards define the rounds and which regions will be contested, but we can only ever see the next two, so building in anticipation - as I did - turns out to be kind of a dumb strategy. On a turn you play a single card which allows you to add/move villagers, boats, priests, place a fort, or establish the more powerful village - if you have used a villager/boat combo to harvest resources: you can't build villages without them. 

The moment someone plays a Sentinel the next region in the array is scored, and everyone gets their played cards back into hand. But there's a catch here: when the next region card is revealed, whoever played the Sentinel can choose to discard it and flip a random one from the deck. I was bitten three or four times by this, as my strong south side of the island kept missing out on scoring opportunities. 

The board can be a bit fiddly to read but I enjoyed this; very interactive but reasonably speedy. My lack of strategic/tactical/any management skills steered me into last place again, as further up the track Adam and Martin duked it out on in the north, and Ian navigated his way to a joint first place by triggering the final scoring round!

Ian and Martin 61 rejoice in shared victory
Adam 53
Sam 47 

It was past 10 by now so we moved on to So Clover. Maybe it was the heat but instantly there was a round of plaintive groaning as we all looked at our words and grumbled about them. Surprisingly we opened with a six, but followed it with a four and two threes as there seemed to be so many possible combos and luck was not on our side. Adam's snip for bomb/gamble was a highlight though - when we eventually saw it. 

It was now moments from 11pm and loose talk of a second crack evaporated in the heat, and we made our ways home.