Guise Knights report
Breaking up the twitterfeed with a real post - gaming related no less.
Last night we actually got 3 different games in. We’re normally a crew who BSes for an hour or two and then plays a 2-3 hour game. Last night, was a totally different attack, as we played 3 short games: Fantasy Business, Loot and Citadels.
First up was Fantasy Business. This is a Auction card game that was pretty fun. It has some cooperative and some cutthroat game play.
The three basic turn phases are 1) the auction 2) set prices 3) receive income. 10 turns are played.
Cards of various values corresponding to fantasy goods such as Swords, Armor and Potions are auctioned. Special cards are also auctioned. Bidding begins at the standard price of an item, anywhere from 2 to 6, or 1 for special cards. The first bidder rotates over the course of the game. Each player only acquires 1 card per turn.
Then, players set the prices of the items they have in secret. The price can be set at anywhere from the items standard price (the number at which bidding begins) to double that. The lowest set price per item type gains the player that value plus 2. The highest value set gets nothing. Everyone in between gets the price they set. If everyone agrees on a price, it’s considered the lowest price.
Early on, this leads to cooperation as people invested in the same items agree to set prices high. Early on it’s also easy to gather a monopoly of an item type. During the mid-game, special cards came into play more: monopolies were liquidated, items were stolen and players were denied income, among other things. Then in the late game, cooperation goes away for the most part and everyone without a monopoly sets prices at the lowest possible.
Self-evaluation: I took an early lead, with mid-value monopolies, which were broken up in back to back turns and I simply never recovered. However, I still had fun.
Next we began a game of Citadels, which was interrupted during the first turn. One of our players was on call for computer support, and got a call. We set the Citadels game aside (since we had just started) and jumped into a game of Loot. This was a first play for all of us.
Loot is a quick little acquisition card game where the players play merchant ships of various coin values or pirate ships of various power values. The Pirate ships are used to capture the merchant ships. Special cards: Captains and the Admiral are used to give major boosts to the pirate ship attacks.
Players make the capture of Merchant ships if they have the highest power attack o n a merchant ship when it comes back to their turn. There are 4 colors of Pirates, and each player may only play one color on any one Merchant ship. If there is no attack on a ship, the player who played it captures it. The player with the highest total coin value of captured merchant ships, less value of merchant cards in hand wins.
Self-evaluation: I was never particularly competitive during this game due to some very poor early game decisions. I was the first to set out a merchant ship, and then defended it despite its middling value. I spent too much time trying to get quick low value ships hoping that I could go quantity over quality. This left me with few options to even attempt to get high value ships at the end. Also, at the end, I was stuck with two Captain cards that I couldn’t play, since I didn’t have a ship of corresponding color. It’s a mildly interesting game and a quick play.
Once the support call was completed, we resumed Citadels. We played the version with the Dark City Expansion already included.* It’s a city building card game, where players select characters of different abilities each turn. Players build “districts” of various values, using the different character abilities to help themselves and/or hinder others.
Game end occurs once a player has built 8 “districts,” and the winner is the player with the most total value in play. There are bonuses for being the first the 8 and for having a full set of the different colors various cards are tagged with. This game is one of our regular plays. The game is a lot more complex than this, making it more difficult to explain succinctly. (That is, if you consider 3 paragraph overviews succinct. Besides, nobody’s reading this far down.J)
Self-evaluation: Like Fantasy Business, I too a fairly commanding early lead. However, I pretty much blew my wad to get there. Excellent counter plays by the others as well as my attempts to finesse a quick finish kept me from keeping the lead, and allowed most of the others to catch and pass me. I especially enjoyed the fact that I was much more competitive than I have been in the past, but I’ve always had fun playing this, regardless.
*For those familiar, FWIW: via random draw we had the Emperor replace the King and the Alchemist replace the Merchant.
We wrapped up a little later than desired, but I had big fun.