Pandemonium

Last night Andrew and I had a stab at two-player Panamax, with mixed results.

As previously mentioned, the game has you loading ships and traversing the Panama Canal in order to generate profit for your company, and/or yourself. Ultimately the richest CEO (player) wins - and the richest company is irrelevant.

shipping

My copy of the game only has a faded black and white print-out of the rules, and no appendix at all, which would have been handy for a few of the game's finer details, such as what to do with a Stevedore. But having negotiated the set-up, play is pretty straightforward - the basic options are contract and/or load, and ship movement. The sting in the tail is the narrow sections of canal, where you can park your own ships and force your opponent to shunt it along for you. When ships arrive at the other end, you and the company both get paid.

shares

There's only three turns to the whole game, so even with our struggles with the rules the whole thing was barely 90 minutes. We played a couple of things fast and loose, but the basics were right. I think I may have made a mistake on the amount of dice we used (which determine available actions) for executive actions (the best ones) as the mathematics of it meant Andrew seemed to always have access to them and my role was simply to reveal them by taking the last basic action!

But outside of that, Andrew just made a better CEO than me. He ended the game with his company paying him massive dividends whilst my guys still resembled a nautical start-up.

Andrew 102
Sam 76

We packed away with the jury seemingly undecided. But I would definitely like to play this again - I think it's probably much better with 3 or 4, and ironing out the small rule issues we had can only help.

Andrew perused the alcove and picked out Pyramid Arcade, as we had another stab at Colour Wheel. This is possibly the simplest game I own, but I love it. Group the colours by swapping same-colour or same-size pyramids, until they are all clustered into their own colour-groups. We succeeded twice, with turns to spare.

Andrew and Sam: win
Pyramid Arcade: loses

We stuck with Pyramid Arcade for our next game: Tree House. In this game you're trying to match the three pyramids in front of you with the three pyramids in the centre of the table: same placement, direction, orientation, etc. On your turn you roll a die and take the appropriate action: Tilt means knock a standing pyramid on its side. Aim means change the direction a sideways pyramid is pointing. Dig means a sideways pyramid can 'dig down' and resurface upright - either in the same place, or elsewhere in your row. And so on.

If you can take the action, you must, and if you can't you have the option of applying it to the 'treehouse' in the middle of the table instead. I think we won a game each - it's ok, but at the end there's that slightly flat feeling that you've just been a grease monkey for the shenanigans of the game itself, rather than the players engaged in it.

As Pyramid Arcade was out on the table though, we tried out another of its 22 games: Looney Ludo. Despite the multiple boards (that move, rotate, swap positions etc during play) this felt surprisingly similar to Tree House. Your goal is to bring all your pieces 'home' to your own board, but doing so involves negotiating the ever-shifting landscape and the possibility your opponent will move your pieces for you. To be fair it's supposed to be fast and silly, but it felt to me like a random abstract with 'fast and silly' foisted onto somewhat.

Sam: wins
Andrew: doesn't

A few games in and I'm still rather ambivalent about Pyramid Arcade. It looks so lovely from the box to the pieces, but out of the games I've played so far only two have really struck me as ones I'd be keen to play again: the silly stacking of Verticality and the co-operative puzzle of Colour Wheel... which is what we finished with, completing our challenge again with just one turn to spare...

Elementary Canal

The games collection is undergoing a purge: I'm shedding games that don't get played and trying to make front room of our house looks like it belongs to a reasonably sane human being rather than a meeple-obsessed hobbit.

Tangent to that is the idea that I actually play the games I've bought and work my way through the guilty dozen (probably more than a dozen, I imagine) or so games that are sitting lovelorn on the shelves. Recently I've blitzed through A Feast for Odin, Black Orchestra, Euphoria, and Trajan. Feast is now a firm favorite after a shaky start, and Black Orchestra seems to have hit the right spot with myself, Andrew and Stanley too - the pair of us played again last night, and although we didn't get arrested the curfew Nazi curtailed our fun.

 Bedtime for Hitler

After Stan and Joe were settled I duly put on my specs and set up Panamax, the game of shoveling ships though the Panama canal. If that seems an odd choice of verb, just you wait! Ships get shoveled.

"Just push him out the way!"

Despite the location, the theme is very Euro-y, with each player the CEO of a shipping company that is loading ships and taking their cargo through the canal in question. But after that it gets more interesting. For a start, the winner is decided not on the most valuable company, but, in a celebration of rampant capitalism, the richest individual. The straightforward route here is to develop your own company and take payouts from it, but you don't have to do that. You could be a little more creative and, in a celebration of rampant capitalism, let your company go to the dogs whilst you load your cargo onto other players ships at opportune moments and buy shares in their companies instead. Let them do the hard work! As long as you get your money, right?

tiddlywinks/money

The only thing is, the more shares you buy in your own company, the more likely you are to get the 'best CEO' bonus; just like the way those rampant capitalists love to reward themselves for dicking people over in the most anonymous possible way. Plus - the more your company is worth, the more dividends you get...

This meddlesome intrigue gets thicker still when we come to the movement of ships. Each lock in the canal only has a certain amount of space, so any ships coming in behind a full lock will shovel everything forward to the next space in the canal - meaning you can just get in someone's way and have them do the hard work by pushing your cargo forward!

The dice bubble continues to grow

All of this stuff has a random generator too: available actions (12 each round, over 3 rounds) are decided by 12 dice being rolled at the start of the round, and on your turn you take a die, activating the action: get and load an order, move ships. When your ships reach the far end of the canal (routes go in both directions) both the company and you get paid for delivering it. The company gets the pip value of the dice, and you get $2 per die, or you can sacrifice this income to hire some kind of specialists - the stern-looking captain (movement!), the walkie-talkie-wielding stevedore (loading!), the big-chinned financial advisor (money!)

The big-chinned financial advisors are important because they define what you earn at the end of the game by giving you a set of criteria to aim for (you get one at the start of the game too) and make no mistake, these are not optional bonuses á la most-euros you can think of - they really define your plans for the whole game. Like if a real financial advisor tells you to ship goods from China, are you going to start loading a cargo of bratwurst and croissants? - Of course not.

three men called Max

Turn order is important here because going first puts you in the box seat - you have more chance of getting in someone's way and forcing them to move your boats for you. But by the same token, there's an element of risk in this - if nobody takes the plunge then all ships occupying space at the end of each round has to pay for the privilege. So there's a bit of brinkmanship too.

As well as the player ships there are also Cruise ships and military ships that zig zag back and forth - the cruise ships will take a little cargo for you, whereas the military will - potentially - pay you when you shovel them forward. This seeming afterthought makes for a canny tactic, as if you've shipped lots of Chinese goods then the Chinese military adore you and will give you a big payment every time you shovel their ship forward.

After three rounds all players sell their shares and receive cash, plus whatever bonuses their financial advisors bring them. Richest capitalist wins!

just pushing this Military ship through a lake

These are the designers who did the perfectly-serviceable but not that exciting Nippon - on a first impression I think this is streaks ahead of that game. The theme comes through strongly - you're literally pushing boats along the canal. The goal is more disgustingly evident. And the player interaction, which is minimal in Nippon (take an action before X does), is much more present here. I can see quite a few GNNers getting a kick out of this - and getting a kicking too!

Panamax survives the purge.