Season 3, Weeks 12, 13, 14, and 15: Cities, Citadels, and Wicked Hand Gestures.

I'm not Dead!!!

Sorry for not posting in a long time, but as a high school teacher and an adult, the holiday season can get pretty hectic, and some days when I could have been updating this blog, I chose instead to spend time with my family.  I also spent some time gaming, particularly delving into the world of H.P Lovecraft and the incredibly engaging game Mansions of Madness.  I'm not sure if I'm going to bring it in for the club to try out, as even a short scenario can last ninety minutes.  That said, it's a very fun game.

This update goes back a ways, covering the sessions for December and first session back for January.  Quite a few of the games are revisits of successful games from last season and earlier this year, although we did manage to break some new ground.

Week 12

Elder Sign

Last year I mentioned Elder Sign in some previous entries on this blog.  Here's what I had to say way back then:

Elder Sign (is) a great little cooperative game where each player takes on the role of a unique investigator with their own special abilities.  The investigators team up to explore a museum which is currently being invaded by the minions of an Elder God who are attempting to release an ancient evil upon the world.  The investigators fight monsters, search for relics, and open dimensional doorways by rolling special dice.  Like the other games mentioned, maintaining one's sanity is as important as keeping all of your organs in tact.  It's a fun game that still maintains the atmosphere of its larger cousins, but only taking an hour to play.  It also has an IOS version that plays nicely on the iPad (but not nearly as fun as playing with a group of people).

I decided that a return to Elder Sign would be a wise move, in that the club was attracting larger groups of players.  I'm a huge fan of the IOS Elder Sign, and it gives table top players a solid idea about how the mechanics work.  The issue we ran into is that although the game can accommodate larger groups of players, that doesn't mean it's a good idea to play with that many.  We had a group of seven, but in a one and a half hour to two hour session, an individual player isn't as invested in the experience as they would be in a three player game.  The crew won the game, but towards the end a few didn't care if they won or lost.

Between Two Cities and Pit

That was the Tuesday session.  For Friday's game day, I decided to grab a copy of Between Two Cities.  This is an incredibly smart and engaging game.  Between Two Cities is a semi co-operative drafting game, where tiles representing different building structures are passed around and drafted, similar to Sushi Go!.  The tiles are then used to build a 4x4 grid of buildings, such as parks, factories, offices, and houses.  Points are scored based on the relationship between these buildings.  What separates Between Two Cities from other tableau development games is that each player isn't building their own city; they're building two cities with partners.  Each player builds a city with the player to their left, and a second city with the player on their right.  This simultaneous engagement is a very clever idea.  There are no moments when a player is not actively considering their cities, especially since there are two other players counting on an individual to perform.  The scoring is rather interesting as well, in that a player's score is based on their lower of the two cities.  If this creates a tie, the breaker is the value of the players' highest cities.  This style of scoring forces players to carefully consider both cities, instead of placing their attention on one.  This was a very successful game, and we knew we would revisit it soon.

After Between Two Cities, a student introduced us to a game I had never played before, and was completely new to the entire group: Pit (also known as Trading Pit).  Pit is a set collecting game that mimics the trading floor of the stock exchange.  Players are dealt a hand of cards with a picture representing a commodity (cocoa, rice, cattle, etc).  Players attempt to collect nine copies of a particular commodity, and having a complete set scores points based on the value of the product.  A complete set of gold is worth more than rice for example.  Players swap and trade cards by grabbing 1-4 cards they don't want from their hands, and shouting the number of cards they are trading, but not what the cards actually are: "Two! Two! Two! Who needs two!?? I got three! Three! THREE!!!"  This trading happens simultaneously, so the game is a chaotic whirlwind of trading, yelling, and card management.  The set we were playing with had clearly taken a beating over time.  These cards get slapped down and thrown bout with reckless abandon, and yet with all of this chaos, it was a great deal of fun.  It's not for the player looking for quiet strategy or long, drawn out adventures, but it's easy to get swept up in the excitement of this rapid-fire set collecting.  I rather enjoyed the experience, the students had a great time, and the short burst of Pit was a nice contrast to Between Two Cities.

Week 13

Between Two Cities... again... and Star Fluxx

Once again we played Between Two Cities.  Once again, a person won, the same person who won on Friday.  She wins almost every game.  She's a brilliant strategist, and very clever.

After Between Two Cities, we had time for a few rounds of Star Fluxx.  I happen to be a big fan of Fluxx games, but I can see how they may not be for everyone.  I've had a single game of Fluxx last an hour, and some last one round and finish in about a minute.  If players are feeling silly and light-hearted, it's great fun.  If players want a seriously deep strategy game, Fluxx is definitely not for them.

For the uninitiated, Fluxx is a card game.  There are essentially three types of cards in Fluxx: Keepers which are items and characters, Goals which represent a combination of two Keepers the players need to win, and Rule Changes which can either be a spontaneous effect (like swap hands with another player) or lingering effects.  The core rules of the game are draw a card, play a card.  A lingering Rule Change might limit hand size, have everyone play two cards, everyone draw five cards, etc.  The fun...or problem... with Fluxx is that the rules and goals are constantly changing.  A player is never really at an advantage or disadvantage.  They may have four "excellent" Keepers in front of them, and are one card away from meeting their goal when, surprise, another players steals a Keeper, changes the Goal, and forces the player to swap seats with another.

Star Fluxx, like many of the Fluxx games, chooses to follow a specific theme.  In this case, Star Fluxx is dedicated to the science fiction genre, and the keepers and goals reflect Sci-Fi pop culture.  Fans of Star Trek, Doctor Who, Star Wars, and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy will find quite a bit to smile about in this game.  Some students enjoyed the game.  They got into the wacky spirit that was intended, however some players new to the Fluxx system found the whole thing frustrating.  One had cultivated a rather desirable set of Keepers, only to be forced to trade spots with another player, leaving all of their cards behind.  Personally, I like Fluxx.  It's a great light-weight filler.

Lost in R'lyeh and Rock, Paper, Wizard

Friday's session featured Lost in R'lyeh once again.  This is quickly becoming one of my favourite games.  It accommodates a large group of people, it's strategic, and yet really easy to pick up and play.  It's a great warm up or filler.

We also played Rock, Paper, Wizard.  RPW is unlike anything I've ever played before, or like something everyone has played before, depending on how you look at it.  The premise of the game is rather interesting; a group of wizards have just killed a dragon, and they are fighting over the dragon's hoard.  The game board is essentially a track with the pile of gold at one end (along with the corpse of said dragon), and the cave opening at the other.  The players cast spells at each other.  These spells can have a variety of effects; they can move opponents further away from the gold, move a wizard closer to the treasure, redirect spells, steal gold, and other interesting outcomes.  The spells, based on the Dungeons and Dragons IP, are cast through hand-gestures akin to Rock, Paper, Scissors.  Players simultaneously chant "Rock-Paper-Wizard!" while slapping a fist in their hands and making a gesture based on a series of cards in the center of the table.  These cards illustrate the hand gestures for the available spells that round.  Beginning with a first player, each spell takes effect in sequence with the player to the left.  This means the first player usually executes their desired spell, while each sequential player may have their spell redirected.

Rock, Paper, Wizard was an interesting experience, and the students enjoyed many aspects of it, but it did have some snags.  One's hand gestures have to be very clear.  We also found this game tended to encourage players to stand up, which is awkward at times.  There is also very little strategy.  Because spell redirection is so common, spells rarely land on the target you had originally token.  We found that we won each round almost accidentally. RPW is a neat and innovative filler, but it might be a while before it hits the table again.

Week 14

The following week we played Libertalia, Rumble in the Dungeon, and Junk Art.  There's not much to report.  We had fun, but we've played the games before, so there were no major surprises.

Week 15

Citadels 2016

I finally got my hands on this game.  After a session of Libertalia the previous week, Citadels was an easy game to play.  Citadels feels like a streamlined Libertalia, but instead of dubloons or treasure, players compete for city cards (which feel sort of like 7 Wonders), or coins.  In a given game there are only eight different roles (as opposed to the thirty in Libertalia), and everyone drafts cards from a common deck, so there are no ties when it comes to card effects.  Citadels 2016 is a definitive edition, in that it features many cards from previous expansions.  These multiple cards and potential set ups give this game a great deal of replayability.  The game comes loaded with suggested alternative set-ups based on the massive variety of cards.  This reminds me of Sushi Go: Party! and the multiple scenarios. 

We enjoyed the game, and once the club figured out the rhythm of the play style, it was easy to start building strategies.  It was great to play another engaging game that scales up to seven players.  Although we enjoyed the game, playing it so soon after Libertalia turned out to be a glass-half empty/full situation; easy to pick up and play, but so similar to Libertalia it didn't provide a vastly different feeling.  The students were preoccupied with the similarities and natural comparisons of the two titles.  In the future, I'll have to make sure there is some distance between the two titles.

Thanks for reading!  A new update is coming soon...no, seriously!