Troyes, Troyes again

This evening we had six gamers around the kitchen table. Despite our recent extra-curricular games, Sam and I were still excited at the prospect of another games night. Joe, Adam, Steve and Anja made up the rest of the gang. Jonny was going to be here, but couldn't make it at the last moment.

With six of us, we played Mord Im Arosa. This game of gravity-based sleuthing was new to many of us, but it was swiftly explained and before long we were hunting up and down the seven-floor hotel looking for clues or trying to cover our tracks. With more than two-players, it's quite a different game and does need a little more concentration that before. However, late in the game a detached flap on one of the floors caused a blockage which made sleuthing easier than you'd otherwise expect, which pushed someone over the "ten suspicious cubes" limit and ended the game.

1. Anja 10
2= Sam 11
2= Andrew 11
3. Adam 14
4. Steve 15
5. Joe 16

After this, we split into a group of four and a group of two. Joe and I played Troyes (and I found out that the only reason he gave it to me for my birthday was so he'd have someone to play it with) while the others settled down with Portobello Market. I'll leave it to them to fill in the details of their two games, but the scores were

Adam 105
Steve 95
Anja 82
Sam 65

And in the second game...

Sam 106
Steve 84
Adam 82
Anja 79

Meanwhile, Joe and I reintroduced ourselves to Troyes. I discovered a couple of rules I hadn't got right first time round, but I think my recent practise helped me. Joe started by pushing me out of my positions on the buildings, so I got fewer dice, but with only four rounds it didn't seem to make too much difference. And even if I do say so myself, I made some canny decisions in the final round. When the victory points were counted up, I found that I'd won by the slimmest of margins.

Andrew 33
Joe 32

Since it was still early(ish) and we'd all finished our games at the same time, we reconvened for another six-player game. This time, 6nimmt was brought out, and despite its confusing rules (at least until you play it) and Sam's instance it should be called 5nimmt, since you take five cards and leave the sixth, it was a fun game.

Despite his previous good form, Adam did badly from the start but quickly recovered. My form dropped dramatically after the first round, while Sam managed to dodge most of the damage being given out to the other players. By the end, we admitted that no one really had a strategy and Adam said that he did worst when he tried to plan ahead.

Sam 20
Steve 31
Adam 45
Anja 47
Joe 49
Andrew 66

So five games and four winners. And hats off to "Second Place" Steve for his consistency, which sees him up to third with Anja hot on his heels. Despite picking up a sixth place, I stay on the same number of points, while Joe falls due to his habit of coming in fifth.

						Points
Sam	1	1	4	2	1	9
Adam	3	3	1	3	1	11
Steve	2	2	2	4	4	14
Anja	4	4	3	1	2	14
Andrew	6	1	2	3	3	15
Jonny	1	3	5	3	3	16*
Quentin	1	3	5	5	5	19
Joe	5	2	5	2	4	19
Hannah	2	3	5	5	5	20

* the decay rule –people with five results registered, after a while, will find their score go down one point per week if they don't attend for three weeks. It may sound harsh, but it stops the regulars getting resentful. If they attend another evening, all decay points are removed.

Meanwhile, I've been keeping the old style leaderboard up to date. To be honest, it's suffering from the same trouble as last season. Sam is leading with 101 points, Joe is second with 86, Adam has 78 and then I'm fourth with 65.5. After that it's the usual large gap to fifth (Steve, 38.5).

However, the Olympic style leaderboard is looking much more exciting, with a real three-way battle for supremacy. Joe may have fallen to eighth in the form table, but he's still in the running here. And form is transient. Medals last forever. If we gave out medals, that is.

The Olympic leaderboard...

	Gold	Silver	Bronze
Sam	8	10	1
Joe	7	4	6
Adam	6	3	6
Steve	2	4	0
Andrew	1	4	7
Anja	1	2	1
Jonny	1	0	5
Quentin	1	0	1
Hannah	0	1	1

Four games in a day, and not a leaderboard in sight

I spent a tranquil afternoon as I played through a game of Troyes by myself, just to get an idea of how it works, with Final Score on the TV to keep me company. And, despite Garth Crooks' increasingly theatrical sighs of dismay at Newcastle vs. Wolves or whatever, I enjoyed my first walkthrough of this dice-based game (but in a good way) of disaster-management.

Soon after that I got a text from Sam about a impromptu games evening, and so before long I was sitting at his kitchen table, complete with red and white polka dotted tablecloth (not a patch on Joe's green felt, frankly) learning another new game.

We began with Portobello Market. In this, one has to build up market stalls along streets and then score them according to the customers (normal, aristocrats or the baron) with an option to score districts, too, which scores big but can reduce the number of actions you can do in future turns. In the first game, we were just warming up, unsure of any tactic.

Sam 195
Andrew 180

On the second go, we were a little more canny. We paid more attention to the position of the policeman (which lets you place market stalls) but it was still too early to fully compute the role of the baron, who appears automatically when the last customer is placed on the board. Is it worth leaving a space on the board where you are strongest, hoping that he'll drop into your lap on the last go? Or should you play safe, use an aristocrat and get the points early? Such is life for the Portobello market-stall holder circa 1901.

Sam 209
Andrew 200

After this, we decided to squeeze in one last game. Mord im Arosa. In this game, players have to solve a murder using only their sense of hearing. Cubes are dropped into a cardboard tower and by listening, each player has to guess where the murder took place. A wrong guess means the player has to add their own cubes to the murder scene, which increases the odds of them being unveiled as the murderer.

It's a silly game and a lot of fun. I turned out that I have quite the aptitude for this game, as my guesses regarding the location of Sam's suspicious cubes was unerringly accurate. The game ended with a large enough margin of victory for the heinous crime to be solved.

"Solid Alibi" Andrew 5
"Blood on his hands" Sam 14

Both games were a lot of fun, although would probably be more so with more players. Especially Portobello Market which has potential for quite a bit of Analysis Paralysis if four are playing, I think.

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.

Trial by Troyes

Having convinced Sam he should buy Troyes (rather than Shipyard — I was going by the BGG ratings: Troyes 35 — Shipyard 126), I felt it only right that I offer to learn the rules. I relish learning the rules to a new game — as long as it's on my own time. I take very little pleasure in trying to get up to speed on the rules to a game which everybody already knows, whilst playing, but sitting down with the game and rulebook, and keeping the BGG forums handy to answer questions, is a lovely way to spend an hour or so. At least I think so.

Troyes, like so many of these games we love, has a relatively poorly-written rulebook.

But boiled down to its essence, the game is pretty straightforward; there are three areas in the city; the palace, the bishopric and the city hall, in which you can place meeples. These meeples represent your influence in the military (red), religious (white) and mercantile (yellow) areas, and determine how many of each coloured dice you get to roll.

These dice are your actions for the turn, though you can also buy dice from other players.

The dice are used to activate activity cards , combat events that threaten the city, construct the cathedral, and add meeples to the three areas, increasing your share of the dice in subsequent turns. So far so euro-by-numbers (apart from the dice).

Added to this are a couple of interesting features:

The influence track — this is a point track that you can use to affect your dice rolls; one influence will allow you to re-roll a dice, and four points will allow you to turn up to three of your dice to their reverse side (great if you roll a bunch of ones or twos). Influence is relatively easy to come by, and your spcae on the track will tend to ebb and flow during the game.

The other interesting thing is the 6 special characters — each player at the start of the game gets one of these and keeps it secret. Each of them gives points at the end of the game for various things — 5, 10 or 15 points on the influence track, for instance. The thing with these is that all players will receive these points, not just the person holding the card, so while each player has a secret objective, if you can deduce it correctly you can make sure you too collect influence and reap the rewards.

After several aborted attempts to wrap our heads round it, on the third try it seemed to stick, and Sam and I managed a two-player game during teatime the other day.

It's very thinky — there's a smattering of maths involved; the various activity cards that come up have what amounts to a quadratic equation on them; 1 to 3 red dice divided by n, gives you x attempts at y. It seems an odd layer of complication or obfuscation, and neither of us is sure it is entirely neccessary. But at the end of the game, I felt it was a satisfying experience, and want to delve back in to better understand what's possible.

It's almost like an evolved euro — one where there really are many many options of different kinds, and if you can wrap your head around them there are some very creative ways to score points. And it's pretty. At least I think so.

New Additions

Nurse! Gas and air!

I can't keep up with Joe's prolific collection but yesterday I found myself in the Orc's Nest (we just don't help ourselves with these shop names, do we?) and managed throw a large amount of cash in the shop assistant's delighted face to purchase Troyes (a Joe recommendation, so he'll be paying me cost if I don't like it) where gamers "recreate four centuries of history in this famous city" - dunno much else -

and At The Gates Of Loyang, a Uwe Rosenberg creation that has lovely looking meeples in it:

Not that I bought it for the meeples; obviously the intracacies of Chinese peasant culture was the selling point for me. In Area 51 they say the worse the artwork is on the box, the better the game - so Loyang should be a cracker. The lady on the front looks like she's just heard the lewdest joke imaginable about that leek and turnip arrangement.

Anyway, two additions to our growing brood, and what with Tigris and Euphrates and others in the wings, maybe Adam and Andrew need to hold Joe and I back before this game-playing hobby becomes this game-collecting obsession...