games day
We had something over a dozen guests yesterday for a day and evening
of board games. I think this was our largest crowd yet; usually when
we send out a mass invitation we get about 65-75% positive responses,
but this time everyone said yes. (Two then did not come; one was sick
and I'm not sure what happened to the other.)
In the first round I played La Citta with alaricmacconnal and three other players. I've only played this game a few times, but I find I enjoy it a lot. If I were a more-experienced player I might have picked up on some of the subtler currents of the game; as it was, I was quite surprised to find that I had won by one point, as I thought other players were ahead of me.
The basic idea is that you are building cities, one building/feature (tile) at a time. Some of the features are functional, like farms; others serve a cultural function, like public baths and cathedrals. You need the former to function, but it's the latter that can eventually attract population from other less-attractive cities. While cities start far apart and this migration isn't possible, as they grow they get close to each other and people can start looking for a better deal somewhere else. Building these things lets you attract people; the flip side of that is that not building them causes you to lag behind so that your people leave. Since you need people in order to build new city tiles, you can end up in a bootstrapping problem where you cannot hang onto the people long enough to build the tiles that will prevent your people from leaving. This happened to one of my cities and it was frustrating; fortunately, the near-collapse of an opponent's city near my other one allowed me to compsensate, and building a third city late in the game gave me some fairly easy points that ended up making the difference.
While we were playing this, others were playing Carcassonne and Nexus Ops. Nexus Ops turned out to be the hit of the day; I think it got played by three different groups by the end of the day. I wasn't in any of them, but Dani gave it positive reviews. (Someone had compared it to Axis and Allies and that flipped my "eh" bit, since 20th-century wargames aren't my thing, but it turned out that only the mechanics are similar. This became obvious when I overheard snatches of conversation about dragons attacking in the fungus by the citadel, or something like that.)
After all this, and once we knew that everyone who was coming was there, we redistributed. Some folks played American Megafauna, which I've seen run anywhere from two to six+ hours; I think this one ran around five. I didn't notice how many players they had. The idea is that it's 250 million years ago and you're playing a proto-species that can evolve, spin off related species, and adapt to the changing environment. You need to find hospitable places to live with enough food (which includes other players' species). It's a fun game with some UI challenges we haven't solved yet. I hadn't yet seen someone get knocked out due to extinction; it happened to one of the players last night, but he was able to get back in eventually -- as a cockroach. Ah, resilient life-forms. :-)
Meanwhile, I was in a four-player game of Caylus, which I have played once or maybe twice before. I might have been the only person who had played before, though gootmu, who appears to grok both strategy and tactics pretty quickly, ended up mopping up the floor with two of the rest of us. (One other player had made good advances on him.) Until late in the game we were all clumped on the scoring track -- at one point with only a three-point spread among the four of us. The game ended sooner than I expected, which reminded me that I thought that last time too.
When we finished Megafauna and Nexus Ops were still going and one of our players had to leave, so we had a three-player game of Puerto Rico. I thought I was getting creamed score-wise, though I was doing well in other ways, but it turned out I only lost by about four points (49-45 with the third player behind me, IIRC). The winner (gootmu) played a "grow tons of corn and play 'captain' often" strategy, racking up the victory points for shipping goods. (It doesn't matter what goods you ship.) I, meanwhile, had managed to build a university early on, meaning that my buildings auto-populated, so I supplemented that with a hacienda (?) so my fields auto-populated, and then built the large building that scores based on your population. I chose those buildings initially so I could get the jump on new production (without waiting for the population-growth phase of the game), but it ended up making a significant difference in my score, too.
We seem to have made a net profit on snacks; we ended up with more munchies and slightly more drinks than we had started with. (I don't feel too guilty about this, as we did provide dinner.) We'll just have to have another games day to take care of that. :-)
One of our guests was temporarily in a wheelchair due to a broken leg (sounded like a bad break from her description), which I didn't know in advance. (I knew about the disability, but thought she was on crutches.) Most of our first floor did not pose problems, and it's good to know that a wheelchair does fit through one doorway I thought questionable. I'm not sure how she managed the powder room; that might have required using structural features (like the sink) as supports (lean on this and hop over). I guess it's an improvement over my previous house, which had no first-floor restroom at all, but it reminded me that we still have accessibility barriers even setting aside the steps one must use to get into the house in the first place.
In the first round I played La Citta with alaricmacconnal and three other players. I've only played this game a few times, but I find I enjoy it a lot. If I were a more-experienced player I might have picked up on some of the subtler currents of the game; as it was, I was quite surprised to find that I had won by one point, as I thought other players were ahead of me.
The basic idea is that you are building cities, one building/feature (tile) at a time. Some of the features are functional, like farms; others serve a cultural function, like public baths and cathedrals. You need the former to function, but it's the latter that can eventually attract population from other less-attractive cities. While cities start far apart and this migration isn't possible, as they grow they get close to each other and people can start looking for a better deal somewhere else. Building these things lets you attract people; the flip side of that is that not building them causes you to lag behind so that your people leave. Since you need people in order to build new city tiles, you can end up in a bootstrapping problem where you cannot hang onto the people long enough to build the tiles that will prevent your people from leaving. This happened to one of my cities and it was frustrating; fortunately, the near-collapse of an opponent's city near my other one allowed me to compsensate, and building a third city late in the game gave me some fairly easy points that ended up making the difference.
While we were playing this, others were playing Carcassonne and Nexus Ops. Nexus Ops turned out to be the hit of the day; I think it got played by three different groups by the end of the day. I wasn't in any of them, but Dani gave it positive reviews. (Someone had compared it to Axis and Allies and that flipped my "eh" bit, since 20th-century wargames aren't my thing, but it turned out that only the mechanics are similar. This became obvious when I overheard snatches of conversation about dragons attacking in the fungus by the citadel, or something like that.)
After all this, and once we knew that everyone who was coming was there, we redistributed. Some folks played American Megafauna, which I've seen run anywhere from two to six+ hours; I think this one ran around five. I didn't notice how many players they had. The idea is that it's 250 million years ago and you're playing a proto-species that can evolve, spin off related species, and adapt to the changing environment. You need to find hospitable places to live with enough food (which includes other players' species). It's a fun game with some UI challenges we haven't solved yet. I hadn't yet seen someone get knocked out due to extinction; it happened to one of the players last night, but he was able to get back in eventually -- as a cockroach. Ah, resilient life-forms. :-)
Meanwhile, I was in a four-player game of Caylus, which I have played once or maybe twice before. I might have been the only person who had played before, though gootmu, who appears to grok both strategy and tactics pretty quickly, ended up mopping up the floor with two of the rest of us. (One other player had made good advances on him.) Until late in the game we were all clumped on the scoring track -- at one point with only a three-point spread among the four of us. The game ended sooner than I expected, which reminded me that I thought that last time too.
When we finished Megafauna and Nexus Ops were still going and one of our players had to leave, so we had a three-player game of Puerto Rico. I thought I was getting creamed score-wise, though I was doing well in other ways, but it turned out I only lost by about four points (49-45 with the third player behind me, IIRC). The winner (gootmu) played a "grow tons of corn and play 'captain' often" strategy, racking up the victory points for shipping goods. (It doesn't matter what goods you ship.) I, meanwhile, had managed to build a university early on, meaning that my buildings auto-populated, so I supplemented that with a hacienda (?) so my fields auto-populated, and then built the large building that scores based on your population. I chose those buildings initially so I could get the jump on new production (without waiting for the population-growth phase of the game), but it ended up making a significant difference in my score, too.
We seem to have made a net profit on snacks; we ended up with more munchies and slightly more drinks than we had started with. (I don't feel too guilty about this, as we did provide dinner.) We'll just have to have another games day to take care of that. :-)
One of our guests was temporarily in a wheelchair due to a broken leg (sounded like a bad break from her description), which I didn't know in advance. (I knew about the disability, but thought she was on crutches.) Most of our first floor did not pose problems, and it's good to know that a wheelchair does fit through one doorway I thought questionable. I'm not sure how she managed the powder room; that might have required using structural features (like the sink) as supports (lean on this and hop over). I guess it's an improvement over my previous house, which had no first-floor restroom at all, but it reminded me that we still have accessibility barriers even setting aside the steps one must use to get into the house in the first place.