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viktor_haagLast weekend was a fairly light game weekend, all things considered. Only played three games: Power Grid once, and Pillars Of The Earth twice.
Power Grid
This past Friday, we played Power Grid with the US map (I've owned the game for how long now, and this was the first time I had played the US map, which is available in the basic game: strange). Several things I noticed about the map:
• We played with four players, and there was very little crowding in the first two rounds: the map nicely provided four small inexpensive clusters for the players to stake out. However, this illusion of open-ness ended swiftly. On turn three, the knives came out, and turn order became very, very important.
• The map is arranged so that grids are much easier to build north-south than east-west. This makes a certain amount of sense, but it also means that you have to plan for a big grid expense in turn three or four. At some point early, you're most likely going to run out of north-south room and then have to swallow at least one set of huge connection costs. This "channelling" of grids is less evident on the German map, I think. I wonder if this means that the US map is a better one to start on? It should be easier to see what you're going to have deal with on the US map. However, new players will always (in my experience) have to work against the counter-intuitive notion that grid placements don't have to be adjacent, as the mechanical meme of adjacent placement is so prevalent in games.
• I'm not sure that the west coast is a great idea for anyone. In our game, we played without the east coast, and only one player took a western board position. The rest of us clustered in the central regions. Still, the western player did not finish well at all. I think Power Grid is one of those games where it seems like a good idea to stake out an area far away from other players, but in reality, you want to have a cluster to yourself for the first stage of the game that's right up next to another player's cluster, so that when stage two hits, the two of you can immediately leap into each other's cities. Mind you, the west coast does provide two nice starting clusters (the Portland/Seattle pair, and the LA/SD/SF trio), so maybe what was holding her back was the lack of a paired player, and not the much larger connection costs out west.
• Managing turn order in Power Grid is probably the most important part of the game; you can get by without the best plants, and you can get by without the best locations, or the cheapest resources, from time to time. But you really do need to be cognizant of your turn position and how to manage it effectively and change it when needed. Keep this in mind when buying plants, and especially when building houses.
• Sometimes it's worth it to buy an inefficient plant, just because it has capacity. In our game, there were two inefficient plants that came up, that had a 6 capacity and a 5 capacity. One player managed to get both at a relatively cheap price, while the rest of us turned up our noses at them and felt confident that better ones would arrive. Then the rest of the game got well mired as Stage 2 lasted for a very long time with an alarming draw over and over again of low-tech, low capacity plants! Nobody else was able to get a high-capacity plant until the very end (let alone two). In the end, I dived to the end just to end the game and secure my second place position, because I knew there was now way I was going to be able to compete with my wife with the 6 and 5 plants, because there's no way I could have bought the two plants required to best her total before she could end the game. Wow. Moral of the story: keep up with the Jonses when it comes to plant capacity! Ignore this maxim at your peril.
The more I play this game, the more I like it. It's not perfect, but it's so well suited to our group of players. If I had to keep just three board-games out of my entire collection (and expansions were included as freebies in the appropriate slots) then they would be (without any question whatsoever) Power Grid, Age Of Steam, and Civilization. There are other games, and other great games, but these three are far and away my favourite board-games on balance. At the moment anyway.
Pillars Of The Earth
This new Kosmos offering got great buzz from Essen. Everyone was saying "plays like Caylus, but faster!" I took this as a mixed recommendation, because I don't think the only thing wrong with Caylus is its length. Caylus is a very good game, but it is slightly uncooked, and we all know how unpleasant your pancakes can be when there's a little spot of uncooked batter in the middle. Kosmos (and other German heavy-weights like Hans Im Glück and Ravensburger) have a well-deserved reputation for game development. They take good designs and refine away all the impurities, stripping a game down to its essence. If the design is very good, then this development process produces a gem. If the design is only mediocre, then the process can produce a game that's oddly flat, as it has no charm or flavour to prop up its design flaws.
Pillars Of The Earth is a very good design, and it's very well developed. It's not precisely like Caylus, but it does have mechanisms that are reminiscent of same (as well as another recent game, Leonardo da Vinci, than which it is also better).
In the game, each player essentially assumes the role of a powerful family contributing to the construction of a cathedral. The game lasts for 6 rounds. In each round, you get to use your troupe of "masters" to select three actions you will take (from about ten different options); some of these actions can be taken by more than one players, others can not; some of the actions change from round to round (special privileges that can be had, craftsmen that can be drafted). Also, in each round, you get to use your troupe of "workers" to gather resources, or generate income. Finally, in each round, you can use your money to hire craftsmen (only two players each round can do this).
The opportunities for privileges, craftsmen, or gathering resources are controlled by decks of cards with different costs and benefits. (For example, there's a card to let you acquire two sand cubes by assigning two workers; there's also a card to let you acquire four stone cubes by assigning ten workers.)
The turn order for assigning your workers and hiring craftsmen is determined. The turn order for assigning your masters is not. All masters go into a bag and are drawn out one by one. As with Da Vinci, you pay a high price (in money) to assign a master when yours is drawn, but you can pass and put your master in a queue. This makes the assignment price cheaper for all further masters. This process divides master assignment into two sections: the first section of assignments where it costs money, and the second section of masters who are sitting in the pass queue. Finessing this process is a very important part of the game: do you pay to take what you need, or do you pass, making choices cheaper for everyone else (including you if you have masters still left to be drawn)?
Pillars Of The Earth is all about figuring out the relative worth of just about everything in terms of eventual pay out in victory points. There are two ways to get Victory Points: assign your Master to the action of "Get 2 VPs" or "Get 1 VP"; or use a craftsman (hired or drafted) to turn resources into VPs, or money into VPs. There is also a single craftsman that gives you one free VP every turn, and a single craftsman that lets you turn resources into money.
So, the question is - what do I pay for this craftsman? Is the cost worth it? What do I pay to make sure I get this action? How many VPs will I get out of it in the end?
And the game has luck: the privilege cards and event cards are randomly drawn (and some privileges and events will not feature in each game, unknown which ones), and the craftsman cards are organized into six "waves" of four, but within each wave, it's not known which two craftsman may be hired and which may be drafted. Turn order determines who has the opportunity to hire, but since drafting is a "master" assigned action, it's unknown who'll have the ability to draft first.
The presence of luck means that another huge component of the game is managing risk. Don't put all your eggs in one basket, and always try to have several paths to victory for as long as you can.
Pillars Of The Earth seems like such a good game, that I'm certain that it will see table time and take away table time from Caylus. And it has stopped me from buying Leonardo da Vinci: since I have both Pillars and Caylus, I can see no real reason to buy da Vinci. On the other hand, Pillars does not have the depth that either of the other two games has, and so I'm not sure what its shelf life will be. Will it tap itself out at some point? Caylus, despite its length and flaws, may have longer endurance simply because of the wider and deeper number of options available to players.
But it's encouraging that we played a three player in the afternoon, and then immediately wanted to play a four-player in the evening.
(Plus, as is typical of Kosmos big-box games, the bits are undeniably gorgeous. The rules are clear and help you learn the game on your first play in a clever fashion; and the game components themselves assist you in playing the game in a very good, although language dependent, manner.)
A very good game and well worth the money.
Power Grid
This past Friday, we played Power Grid with the US map (I've owned the game for how long now, and this was the first time I had played the US map, which is available in the basic game: strange). Several things I noticed about the map:
• We played with four players, and there was very little crowding in the first two rounds: the map nicely provided four small inexpensive clusters for the players to stake out. However, this illusion of open-ness ended swiftly. On turn three, the knives came out, and turn order became very, very important.
• The map is arranged so that grids are much easier to build north-south than east-west. This makes a certain amount of sense, but it also means that you have to plan for a big grid expense in turn three or four. At some point early, you're most likely going to run out of north-south room and then have to swallow at least one set of huge connection costs. This "channelling" of grids is less evident on the German map, I think. I wonder if this means that the US map is a better one to start on? It should be easier to see what you're going to have deal with on the US map. However, new players will always (in my experience) have to work against the counter-intuitive notion that grid placements don't have to be adjacent, as the mechanical meme of adjacent placement is so prevalent in games.
• I'm not sure that the west coast is a great idea for anyone. In our game, we played without the east coast, and only one player took a western board position. The rest of us clustered in the central regions. Still, the western player did not finish well at all. I think Power Grid is one of those games where it seems like a good idea to stake out an area far away from other players, but in reality, you want to have a cluster to yourself for the first stage of the game that's right up next to another player's cluster, so that when stage two hits, the two of you can immediately leap into each other's cities. Mind you, the west coast does provide two nice starting clusters (the Portland/Seattle pair, and the LA/SD/SF trio), so maybe what was holding her back was the lack of a paired player, and not the much larger connection costs out west.
• Managing turn order in Power Grid is probably the most important part of the game; you can get by without the best plants, and you can get by without the best locations, or the cheapest resources, from time to time. But you really do need to be cognizant of your turn position and how to manage it effectively and change it when needed. Keep this in mind when buying plants, and especially when building houses.
• Sometimes it's worth it to buy an inefficient plant, just because it has capacity. In our game, there were two inefficient plants that came up, that had a 6 capacity and a 5 capacity. One player managed to get both at a relatively cheap price, while the rest of us turned up our noses at them and felt confident that better ones would arrive. Then the rest of the game got well mired as Stage 2 lasted for a very long time with an alarming draw over and over again of low-tech, low capacity plants! Nobody else was able to get a high-capacity plant until the very end (let alone two). In the end, I dived to the end just to end the game and secure my second place position, because I knew there was now way I was going to be able to compete with my wife with the 6 and 5 plants, because there's no way I could have bought the two plants required to best her total before she could end the game. Wow. Moral of the story: keep up with the Jonses when it comes to plant capacity! Ignore this maxim at your peril.
The more I play this game, the more I like it. It's not perfect, but it's so well suited to our group of players. If I had to keep just three board-games out of my entire collection (and expansions were included as freebies in the appropriate slots) then they would be (without any question whatsoever) Power Grid, Age Of Steam, and Civilization. There are other games, and other great games, but these three are far and away my favourite board-games on balance. At the moment anyway.
Pillars Of The Earth
This new Kosmos offering got great buzz from Essen. Everyone was saying "plays like Caylus, but faster!" I took this as a mixed recommendation, because I don't think the only thing wrong with Caylus is its length. Caylus is a very good game, but it is slightly uncooked, and we all know how unpleasant your pancakes can be when there's a little spot of uncooked batter in the middle. Kosmos (and other German heavy-weights like Hans Im Glück and Ravensburger) have a well-deserved reputation for game development. They take good designs and refine away all the impurities, stripping a game down to its essence. If the design is very good, then this development process produces a gem. If the design is only mediocre, then the process can produce a game that's oddly flat, as it has no charm or flavour to prop up its design flaws.
Pillars Of The Earth is a very good design, and it's very well developed. It's not precisely like Caylus, but it does have mechanisms that are reminiscent of same (as well as another recent game, Leonardo da Vinci, than which it is also better).
In the game, each player essentially assumes the role of a powerful family contributing to the construction of a cathedral. The game lasts for 6 rounds. In each round, you get to use your troupe of "masters" to select three actions you will take (from about ten different options); some of these actions can be taken by more than one players, others can not; some of the actions change from round to round (special privileges that can be had, craftsmen that can be drafted). Also, in each round, you get to use your troupe of "workers" to gather resources, or generate income. Finally, in each round, you can use your money to hire craftsmen (only two players each round can do this).
The opportunities for privileges, craftsmen, or gathering resources are controlled by decks of cards with different costs and benefits. (For example, there's a card to let you acquire two sand cubes by assigning two workers; there's also a card to let you acquire four stone cubes by assigning ten workers.)
The turn order for assigning your workers and hiring craftsmen is determined. The turn order for assigning your masters is not. All masters go into a bag and are drawn out one by one. As with Da Vinci, you pay a high price (in money) to assign a master when yours is drawn, but you can pass and put your master in a queue. This makes the assignment price cheaper for all further masters. This process divides master assignment into two sections: the first section of assignments where it costs money, and the second section of masters who are sitting in the pass queue. Finessing this process is a very important part of the game: do you pay to take what you need, or do you pass, making choices cheaper for everyone else (including you if you have masters still left to be drawn)?
Pillars Of The Earth is all about figuring out the relative worth of just about everything in terms of eventual pay out in victory points. There are two ways to get Victory Points: assign your Master to the action of "Get 2 VPs" or "Get 1 VP"; or use a craftsman (hired or drafted) to turn resources into VPs, or money into VPs. There is also a single craftsman that gives you one free VP every turn, and a single craftsman that lets you turn resources into money.
So, the question is - what do I pay for this craftsman? Is the cost worth it? What do I pay to make sure I get this action? How many VPs will I get out of it in the end?
And the game has luck: the privilege cards and event cards are randomly drawn (and some privileges and events will not feature in each game, unknown which ones), and the craftsman cards are organized into six "waves" of four, but within each wave, it's not known which two craftsman may be hired and which may be drafted. Turn order determines who has the opportunity to hire, but since drafting is a "master" assigned action, it's unknown who'll have the ability to draft first.
The presence of luck means that another huge component of the game is managing risk. Don't put all your eggs in one basket, and always try to have several paths to victory for as long as you can.
Pillars Of The Earth seems like such a good game, that I'm certain that it will see table time and take away table time from Caylus. And it has stopped me from buying Leonardo da Vinci: since I have both Pillars and Caylus, I can see no real reason to buy da Vinci. On the other hand, Pillars does not have the depth that either of the other two games has, and so I'm not sure what its shelf life will be. Will it tap itself out at some point? Caylus, despite its length and flaws, may have longer endurance simply because of the wider and deeper number of options available to players.
But it's encouraging that we played a three player in the afternoon, and then immediately wanted to play a four-player in the evening.
(Plus, as is typical of Kosmos big-box games, the bits are undeniably gorgeous. The rules are clear and help you learn the game on your first play in a clever fashion; and the game components themselves assist you in playing the game in a very good, although language dependent, manner.)
A very good game and well worth the money.
