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viktor_haagThis weekend at the Old Huron Redoubt worked out to be three days of games and fun. On Friday, we tried out the Italian expansion for Power Grid. On Sunday, our long board-game afternoon decided to exercise one old favourite (Indonesia) and a Wallace game that we hadn't played lots of but I wanted try more of (Struggle of Empires).
Power Grid: Italy
None of our group had tried out this board, so the four of us put it on the table. The game lasted longer than it should, because we were collectively getting more and more tired. Also, the end-game was a bit un-satisfying as the last two turns were pretty much a formality. In order to catch the winner, the other players would have to engage in position-destroying activity to cripple the winner's chances.
However, the Italy board is interesting. Resource and connection costs are high, and therefore money is tight. The board still responds well to the tactic of developing infrastructure in bursts, rather than slow and steady growth.
In the early game, I pinned a position in Southern Italy, to rope off several cities in Sicily for my own later (inexpensive) use. On the Italy board, this strategy seems even more attractive than usual: because connection costs are so high, I think initial placement choice is very important because it's very costly to leap past someone's infrastructure. I also notice that both players that started with ostensibly expensive, southern positions place first and second.
Also, unlike my standard strategies, I spent most of the early and part of the middle game with really weak plants. Until the end game started, I was consistently behind in capacity. My second and third plant purchases were the two lowest capacity green plants. I gambled that the increased resource costs would increase the value of the green plants to the point where they were viable and it was far more important to be thrifty on plant infrastructure costs as a consequence of the resource costs.
In the end, some lucky power plant card draws helped me out, so I'm not sure if my strategic choices were all that strong, or just strong enough to capitalize on the lucky card draws. However, I am fairly certain that managing my turn position in this game was absolutely key. There were two turns in the mid game that I sucked up a short term lag behind on purpose, in order to preserve tempo. On two turns I sprung out for massive infrastructure upgrades: from six cities to nine in one go, and then from 10 to 15 cities in one go.
I think the Italian board is very well suited to four players, and might be well suited to five. The North is very rich, but good board positions are very hard to secure as a result. The Southern provinces are sparse and costly, but good board positions are easy to rope out, so there's much less worry about getting into knife fights with your neighbours. In our game, the two Southern players managed to leak north (because they had to), while the Northern players spent most of the midgame filling up their own region. This left both of the Southern players in an excellent position to make moves in the end game that bottled up the Northern players: the only open spots left to them came with sizeable connection costs, whereas the Southern players were getting away with much smaller connection costs. In the long run, I think the Northern players should have realized this would happen and accelerated their infrastructure in the early game, but with the expensive resources this was not at all easy to see.
Another interesting board for Power Grid, and one well worth playing!
Indonesia
I have written several times about this game, but every time we play it seems we find something new; I have two general topics to discuss.
(a) Firstly, this was the worst finish in Indonesia I had ever personally played. I ended up with less than half the points of the front runner, and almost 45% less points than the second-last finisher. In short, I sucked. I find it really hard to put my finger on exactly where, but I think I have some notion.
To begin with, early on, I took a merger improvement instead of a slot, and this was death (especially in light of point 'b', below). Not only did it leave me with less overall capacity than the rest of the players, but it also left me with a company that was too large and never really performed to capacity (and thus was not worth the money I had paid for it, despite the initial investment being relatively small). Secondly, I compounded this by concentrating my production in one area of the board, and an area on the board that would end up being isolated (i.e. the far west) as all the other players worked to keep the eastern area of the board the hotbed for activity (not actively colluding, but all making self-interested decisions which had an unfortunate harmonic effect).
To accentuate this error, the person playing the shipping strategy (who came in second) made an interesting strategic decision. He never increased his own hull capacity! Nor did he expand to liberally connect production fields with markets. I think his reasoning behind went like this: the best chance I have of winning is to keep the economy small because, while I'll make more money shipping as I ship more goods, I will actually lose position because the other players will make more money faster. Therefore, by making it deliberately hard to ship goods (by keeping capacity low and not connecting markets), the shipper increased the relative value of each one of the shipments that actually went through to him. An interesting strategy. It did not result in a win for him, I think for two reasons: he was unable to completely monopolize the shipping, and eventually the profit margins got out of hand (more profitable goods came on the board, and other players bumped his capacity for him). But it was an interesting try, nonetheless.
(b) Secondly, another case of "Oh, man! We've been playing incorrectly all those years!"
After closely re-reading the rules it seems clear to us that during the Mergers phase, one player can continue to propose mergers as long as only one gets proposed by that player each round of the table and the proposing player can propose a legal merger. This lead to my "merger fiasco" in phase 'a', but I ended up in the fiasco because it occured to me that I could chain mergers together. I had a rice and a spice, and I didn't have quite enough cash to propose a siap faji (microwave dinner) merger myself. So first I proposed a rice consolidation; I lost this, but gained cash. This allowed me to propose and win a spice consolidation (which killed me). I should have paid attention to the fact that I didn't have enough capital to do what I really wanted in the first place, and realized that this was a bad, bad sign...
However, we had been playing with these merger rules for a while now. What we had been getting wrong was the corollary with regard to deed acquisition! Players can acquire more than one deed per turn as long as they have capacity. As with mergers, you can only take one each round of the table, but you can keep grabbing them as long as you have an open slot.
This was a vital rule that we missed in all our earlier games, and it had two hugely important implications: the game went much much faster (less turns), and therefore getting behind was very bad, because you had less time to catch up; also, it meant that getting slots early is key and you cannot afford to forego developing slots for mergers unless you have a very, very good merger planned.
After this past game, I have a hard time believing that anyone should ever do anything except take a slot bump in the first two phases of the game. What other choices make any kind of sense at all? The only other choice that makes sense to me is Merger 2, and this has to be used with exquisite care, I think.
Indonesia is a very, very good game. And punishing if you make a mistake (even more so that the game's duration can be accelerated); we finished our game in just under two hours.
Struggle of Empires
I don't think this is Martin Wallace's best game, but I think it's one of the better ones: it has flavour (though not as much as Liberté), and it has a mixture of strategy and tactics (thought not as well developed as Age Of Steam). What it also has is the basic vicious interaction evident in all area majority games, with an additional layer of vicious interaction imposed through the theme (because not only can you do nasty things to players' direct control of regions through the "control marker" mechanism, but you can also do nasty things to the means by which players enact that region control through armies and navies).
Like most area majority games, Struggle of Empires leans heavily on using your control efficiently. You can't load up in one region, but must spread out your control to put out just enough to get some first places, but also to scoop up second and third place values where you can.
Like most interactive power games, you must also work hard to avoid the ire of other players. Conflict is necessary, but it is expensive. And scrabbling in the end-game for points leads to an acceleration of conflict. Getting involved too much in conflict early leads to not having the resources in the end-game to scrabble, or defend yourself from scrabbling.
Finally, the turn order auction also has the added feature of organizing all players into two teams. You cannot directly attack the players on your team. You are forced into this peaceful position three times, each alliance lasting a full third of the game. Having the money to bid in the auction is therefore every bit as important (if not more so) as in Age Of Steam, as you definitely want to be able to choose both your order of operations, but also which powers you may not attack. It's vital to understand the alliances in this light, because you will find by the end of the game that you almost certainly will want to snatch resources away from players that are immune! A favourite trick as the leading player (used again in this game) is to ensure that, in the last third of the game, you force an alliance with your chief rival. Then, you just must make sure that you do better than that one other player primarily, in the final phase of the game. This is not as effective the tighter the game is, but in games with a big spread of VPs going into the third phase, this strategy is very effective.
This leads me to believe that the end game in Struggle of Empires is somewhat disappointing in games that are not tight. Once a leader leaps out, the player becomes very hard to reel back in. Just under half of the remaining players at the table will not be able to directly assist efforts to leap on the leader, and, indeed, will most certainly not want to do it anyway, because they'll be more interested in scrabbling for their own end-game positions.
This puts the positioning for the end-game at a much higher priority than in many games, and also necessitates meta-gaming in the early and mid games. It's to your huge advantage to have a run-away game, but only if you are in the lead. Otherwise, it's to your advantage to have a tight game. This means that all players in the game must work hard to ensure a tight game through play, unless they can be assured of gathering up a lead.
Accordingly, Struggle of Empires is not really an enjoyable game to play with mixed levels of experience or ability, I don't think. Newbie players must be coached to keep the game tight. A spread out game doesn't really benefit anyone except the one person in the lead.
I liked Struggle of Empires, and still liked it after this play. I would like to play it more, as I think it probably rewards extended playing (as do most Wallace designs).
Power Grid: Italy
None of our group had tried out this board, so the four of us put it on the table. The game lasted longer than it should, because we were collectively getting more and more tired. Also, the end-game was a bit un-satisfying as the last two turns were pretty much a formality. In order to catch the winner, the other players would have to engage in position-destroying activity to cripple the winner's chances.
However, the Italy board is interesting. Resource and connection costs are high, and therefore money is tight. The board still responds well to the tactic of developing infrastructure in bursts, rather than slow and steady growth.
In the early game, I pinned a position in Southern Italy, to rope off several cities in Sicily for my own later (inexpensive) use. On the Italy board, this strategy seems even more attractive than usual: because connection costs are so high, I think initial placement choice is very important because it's very costly to leap past someone's infrastructure. I also notice that both players that started with ostensibly expensive, southern positions place first and second.
Also, unlike my standard strategies, I spent most of the early and part of the middle game with really weak plants. Until the end game started, I was consistently behind in capacity. My second and third plant purchases were the two lowest capacity green plants. I gambled that the increased resource costs would increase the value of the green plants to the point where they were viable and it was far more important to be thrifty on plant infrastructure costs as a consequence of the resource costs.
In the end, some lucky power plant card draws helped me out, so I'm not sure if my strategic choices were all that strong, or just strong enough to capitalize on the lucky card draws. However, I am fairly certain that managing my turn position in this game was absolutely key. There were two turns in the mid game that I sucked up a short term lag behind on purpose, in order to preserve tempo. On two turns I sprung out for massive infrastructure upgrades: from six cities to nine in one go, and then from 10 to 15 cities in one go.
I think the Italian board is very well suited to four players, and might be well suited to five. The North is very rich, but good board positions are very hard to secure as a result. The Southern provinces are sparse and costly, but good board positions are easy to rope out, so there's much less worry about getting into knife fights with your neighbours. In our game, the two Southern players managed to leak north (because they had to), while the Northern players spent most of the midgame filling up their own region. This left both of the Southern players in an excellent position to make moves in the end game that bottled up the Northern players: the only open spots left to them came with sizeable connection costs, whereas the Southern players were getting away with much smaller connection costs. In the long run, I think the Northern players should have realized this would happen and accelerated their infrastructure in the early game, but with the expensive resources this was not at all easy to see.
Another interesting board for Power Grid, and one well worth playing!
Indonesia
I have written several times about this game, but every time we play it seems we find something new; I have two general topics to discuss.
(a) Firstly, this was the worst finish in Indonesia I had ever personally played. I ended up with less than half the points of the front runner, and almost 45% less points than the second-last finisher. In short, I sucked. I find it really hard to put my finger on exactly where, but I think I have some notion.
To begin with, early on, I took a merger improvement instead of a slot, and this was death (especially in light of point 'b', below). Not only did it leave me with less overall capacity than the rest of the players, but it also left me with a company that was too large and never really performed to capacity (and thus was not worth the money I had paid for it, despite the initial investment being relatively small). Secondly, I compounded this by concentrating my production in one area of the board, and an area on the board that would end up being isolated (i.e. the far west) as all the other players worked to keep the eastern area of the board the hotbed for activity (not actively colluding, but all making self-interested decisions which had an unfortunate harmonic effect).
To accentuate this error, the person playing the shipping strategy (who came in second) made an interesting strategic decision. He never increased his own hull capacity! Nor did he expand to liberally connect production fields with markets. I think his reasoning behind went like this: the best chance I have of winning is to keep the economy small because, while I'll make more money shipping as I ship more goods, I will actually lose position because the other players will make more money faster. Therefore, by making it deliberately hard to ship goods (by keeping capacity low and not connecting markets), the shipper increased the relative value of each one of the shipments that actually went through to him. An interesting strategy. It did not result in a win for him, I think for two reasons: he was unable to completely monopolize the shipping, and eventually the profit margins got out of hand (more profitable goods came on the board, and other players bumped his capacity for him). But it was an interesting try, nonetheless.
(b) Secondly, another case of "Oh, man! We've been playing incorrectly all those years!"
After closely re-reading the rules it seems clear to us that during the Mergers phase, one player can continue to propose mergers as long as only one gets proposed by that player each round of the table and the proposing player can propose a legal merger. This lead to my "merger fiasco" in phase 'a', but I ended up in the fiasco because it occured to me that I could chain mergers together. I had a rice and a spice, and I didn't have quite enough cash to propose a siap faji (microwave dinner) merger myself. So first I proposed a rice consolidation; I lost this, but gained cash. This allowed me to propose and win a spice consolidation (which killed me). I should have paid attention to the fact that I didn't have enough capital to do what I really wanted in the first place, and realized that this was a bad, bad sign...
However, we had been playing with these merger rules for a while now. What we had been getting wrong was the corollary with regard to deed acquisition! Players can acquire more than one deed per turn as long as they have capacity. As with mergers, you can only take one each round of the table, but you can keep grabbing them as long as you have an open slot.
This was a vital rule that we missed in all our earlier games, and it had two hugely important implications: the game went much much faster (less turns), and therefore getting behind was very bad, because you had less time to catch up; also, it meant that getting slots early is key and you cannot afford to forego developing slots for mergers unless you have a very, very good merger planned.
After this past game, I have a hard time believing that anyone should ever do anything except take a slot bump in the first two phases of the game. What other choices make any kind of sense at all? The only other choice that makes sense to me is Merger 2, and this has to be used with exquisite care, I think.
Indonesia is a very, very good game. And punishing if you make a mistake (even more so that the game's duration can be accelerated); we finished our game in just under two hours.
Struggle of Empires
I don't think this is Martin Wallace's best game, but I think it's one of the better ones: it has flavour (though not as much as Liberté), and it has a mixture of strategy and tactics (thought not as well developed as Age Of Steam). What it also has is the basic vicious interaction evident in all area majority games, with an additional layer of vicious interaction imposed through the theme (because not only can you do nasty things to players' direct control of regions through the "control marker" mechanism, but you can also do nasty things to the means by which players enact that region control through armies and navies).
Like most area majority games, Struggle of Empires leans heavily on using your control efficiently. You can't load up in one region, but must spread out your control to put out just enough to get some first places, but also to scoop up second and third place values where you can.
Like most interactive power games, you must also work hard to avoid the ire of other players. Conflict is necessary, but it is expensive. And scrabbling in the end-game for points leads to an acceleration of conflict. Getting involved too much in conflict early leads to not having the resources in the end-game to scrabble, or defend yourself from scrabbling.
Finally, the turn order auction also has the added feature of organizing all players into two teams. You cannot directly attack the players on your team. You are forced into this peaceful position three times, each alliance lasting a full third of the game. Having the money to bid in the auction is therefore every bit as important (if not more so) as in Age Of Steam, as you definitely want to be able to choose both your order of operations, but also which powers you may not attack. It's vital to understand the alliances in this light, because you will find by the end of the game that you almost certainly will want to snatch resources away from players that are immune! A favourite trick as the leading player (used again in this game) is to ensure that, in the last third of the game, you force an alliance with your chief rival. Then, you just must make sure that you do better than that one other player primarily, in the final phase of the game. This is not as effective the tighter the game is, but in games with a big spread of VPs going into the third phase, this strategy is very effective.
This leads me to believe that the end game in Struggle of Empires is somewhat disappointing in games that are not tight. Once a leader leaps out, the player becomes very hard to reel back in. Just under half of the remaining players at the table will not be able to directly assist efforts to leap on the leader, and, indeed, will most certainly not want to do it anyway, because they'll be more interested in scrabbling for their own end-game positions.
This puts the positioning for the end-game at a much higher priority than in many games, and also necessitates meta-gaming in the early and mid games. It's to your huge advantage to have a run-away game, but only if you are in the lead. Otherwise, it's to your advantage to have a tight game. This means that all players in the game must work hard to ensure a tight game through play, unless they can be assured of gathering up a lead.
Accordingly, Struggle of Empires is not really an enjoyable game to play with mixed levels of experience or ability, I don't think. Newbie players must be coached to keep the game tight. A spread out game doesn't really benefit anyone except the one person in the lead.
I liked Struggle of Empires, and still liked it after this play. I would like to play it more, as I think it probably rewards extended playing (as do most Wallace designs).
