viktor_haag (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
viktor_haag) wrote2008-03-06 11:33 am
viktor_haag) wrote2008-03-06 11:33 am
Entry tags:
Recently played: Rails of Europe, Container, Race for the Galaxy
Several weeks have passed since I last did a games played update, and I have played several new games (and several old favourites) in the meantime. I don't have much to say about these games, as only a single play at each one hasn't left me with a lot to say.
Rails of Europe
The long-awaited expansion for Railroad Tycoon finally arrived in my possession and it hit the table on the same day I purchased it (mostly because it turned out that I had an evening unexpectedly free). The expansion provides a smaller map, and several slight rules adjustments (some of which I'm interested in porting back into the base game):
You can't issue shares except when you absolutely must to purchase something: this strikes me as a pretty meaningless adjustment, only to prevent a player from issuing shares to satisfy the "most money" card at the end, or to prevent another player form satisfying that card. Since nobody has ever used this tactic in any game that I've ever played seems to indicate that our table won't see much utility in this rule. When I teach the game, I always heavily warn newbies about the dangers of share issuance, and they usually get it (or they don't, and they get instructed about it in their first play).
Building costs have been rationalized: no more arguing about when a build will cross water and when it won't. Any hex (and I mean any hex) with any water in it at all costs 3K to build in. At first play this seems to increase track-building costs because of the number of lakes and fjords tracing their way through hexes. This, combined with the much tighter income scale, seems to make this game a lot more like its Age Of Steam grand-daddy than Railroad Tycoon. I'm not sure this is a change for the better; the community seems to have had a common complaint about "confusion" over building over rivers in Railroad Tycoon, but the rules always seemed perfectly clear to me. However, I don't know that implementing this rule in the base game will have the effect of increasing track costs as it does here, because the number of what would be "water hexes" in the base game is much, much lower.
Major line service bounties are all in play from the start: instead of waiting (hoping?) the card to appear form the Ops deck, all major line bounties are spelled out and available from the start of the game. This was very interesting, and was a vital part of swinging the second, third, and fourth-place finishes in our first game. This change is for the better, in my opinion. We may try doing this in our next play of Railroad Tycoon by pulling out all the major-line cards, and putting them out along with the starting bounty cards.
Draw two, keep one, to get your Tycoon card: instead of getting stuck with a Tycoon card that you really don't like at the start of the game, you can now have a chance to ditch one. This provides another, not so obvious benefit. You have more knowledge about what's not in play. If you have (for example) the "Best Engine" card and the "Least Shares" card, then this puts you in a powerful position, as these two goals are somewhat opposed to one another. The only double in the mix now is the Wealth card, and I'm not sure whether it's better to hope that you get both of them in the opening draft, or not (it's probably better to get both of them, so that you know that no-one else will be competing with you on that point). Again, I suspect that this is a technique we may want to try with the base game.
New turn order track on the board: what's the point of this? There's nothing in the rulebook about implementing an Age Of Steam style auction, so we didn't do that last night. However, given the increased importance of turn order (because the bounties are proportionally more vital in this game, c.f.), having an absolute ordering in the auction might be something interesting to try.
My first thoughts about this expansion is that it's a lot tighter than the base game, and this is probably a welcome change for those who prefer Age Of Steam. The tightness makes satisfying the major lines and tycoon goals more vital, and makes issuing shares in abundance even more dangerous. This also implies that, as with Age Of Steam, getting your income engine ramped up early is much more vital, making the service bounties even more valuable than they are in the base game. There are service bounties which could be satisfied on the first turn in some card draws that are potential game breakers. The player who won the turn auction on the first turn in our game, won the game by several lengths: coincidentally, he snapped up two service bounties on the first turn, netting him six points in the first turn. Although he sunk a lot of shares into infrastructure into the game early, this didn't harm him nearly as much as it might have late in the game, as only one other player was able to avoid the increasing share-debt problem.
If you like Railroad Tycoon, then Rails Of Europe is a highly recommended addition. It adds lots of value to the basic game, and is fairly well priced, all things considered. If you far prefer Age Of Steam and think that Railroad Tycoon is inherently unbalanced and soft, then you would probably be happier saving those dollars for (a) an Age Of Steam expansion mapboard, or (b) the new version of Age Of Steam, when it appears.
Container
I have a feeling that this game sold through more than it otherwise might have, being designer Delonge's farewell design before his untimely death. Typical of Delonge's designs, Container is quite abstract and has a fair amount of take-that-ness under the covers. The game is, essentially, an economic state machine. You invest money to build production infrastructure which produces cubes; you spend money on other people's cubes, and put them in your storage infrastructure (which also requires your investment); you spend money buying cubes from others stores to put them on your ships; you auction cubes off your ships and the winner of those cubes gets to use them for points at the end of the game. The values of cubes are known to you from the start, but everyone has a separate value chart, so some time is probably intended to be spent guessing what other players also value.
The various filters that a cube must pass through before you can score it are a bit bewildering, especially since players have the ability to vary the cost they charge you to use their filters. When is a cube worth the cost of acquiring it? It's also vital to remember that most of your purchases in the game do not contribute to your final score: they rather contribute to the processing/filtering that gets imposed on a cube (so you can easily invest heavily in cubes which contribute to other people's scoring). The trick here is to spend no more than you have to on the processing of cubes, and no more than you have to in the purchasing of cubes which you will finally be able to score at the end.
The game feels a bit like Giganten to me. Is it a good game? Yes, I think it is; it's challenging, well-balanced, and there's not much in the way of downtime. The theme pins reasonably well to the mechanics, and the components are reasonably nice (thank-you design genius Mike Doyle). However, will this game see lots of play? Like, Giganten, somehow I doubt it. In the end, it's rather abstract, dry, and the barrier to entry is a bit steep. Dos Rios is still, I think, Delonge's masterpiece and even that doesn't see much play at our table.
But is Container a good game? Yes. If you like complex economic "spend money to make money" games (and there are lots of folks who really do), then Container will probably tickle your fancy. Am I glad I own it? Yes, but it's proper place is likely in my overflow area, because I'm not sure I'm going to play it all that much. I'm much more likely to want to play something like Indonesia.
Race for the Galaxy
If Puerto Rico really were a challenging card game, then chances are it would be this game, and not San Juan (which bills itself as the Puerto Rico card game). San Juan is light, fast, simple to teach, and a great deal of its fun comes from those characteristics. Race for the Galaxy is, by contrast, not simple to teach or learn, is not particularly light, but is still fast, once you know what you're doing. As such, it's a bit hard for me to say whether this is a really good game or not. There are even more moving parts in this game than in Puerto Rico (or at least it seems that way), and the fact that you can't see all these moving parts throughout the game, makes the game much more challenging to get into. With Puerto Rico, all the buildings are in view all the time; every player has all the options in full view, all the time. In Race for the Galaxy, all the moving parts are written on cards, and so you only see a small number of the moving parts at once: the ones in everyone's tableau, and the ones in your hand. I suspect that for those people who play this game a good deal, it will be much, much more fun than for those folks who put it on the table rarely. And that's a shame, because part of Puerto Rico's excellence is (oddly) its accessibility.
Should you get this game? If you really like Puerto Rico and San Juan, and you don't mind a bit of frustration up front getting your head around things, then I think the answer is, "Yes". However, if you have a very large collection, and you like variety in your gaming, then I worry you'll never really enjoy this game, because (like some abstract strategy games, and some CCGs), I feel this game demands a certain amount of devotion to get the most out of it.
Rails of Europe
The long-awaited expansion for Railroad Tycoon finally arrived in my possession and it hit the table on the same day I purchased it (mostly because it turned out that I had an evening unexpectedly free). The expansion provides a smaller map, and several slight rules adjustments (some of which I'm interested in porting back into the base game):
You can't issue shares except when you absolutely must to purchase something: this strikes me as a pretty meaningless adjustment, only to prevent a player from issuing shares to satisfy the "most money" card at the end, or to prevent another player form satisfying that card. Since nobody has ever used this tactic in any game that I've ever played seems to indicate that our table won't see much utility in this rule. When I teach the game, I always heavily warn newbies about the dangers of share issuance, and they usually get it (or they don't, and they get instructed about it in their first play).
Building costs have been rationalized: no more arguing about when a build will cross water and when it won't. Any hex (and I mean any hex) with any water in it at all costs 3K to build in. At first play this seems to increase track-building costs because of the number of lakes and fjords tracing their way through hexes. This, combined with the much tighter income scale, seems to make this game a lot more like its Age Of Steam grand-daddy than Railroad Tycoon. I'm not sure this is a change for the better; the community seems to have had a common complaint about "confusion" over building over rivers in Railroad Tycoon, but the rules always seemed perfectly clear to me. However, I don't know that implementing this rule in the base game will have the effect of increasing track costs as it does here, because the number of what would be "water hexes" in the base game is much, much lower.
Major line service bounties are all in play from the start: instead of waiting (hoping?) the card to appear form the Ops deck, all major line bounties are spelled out and available from the start of the game. This was very interesting, and was a vital part of swinging the second, third, and fourth-place finishes in our first game. This change is for the better, in my opinion. We may try doing this in our next play of Railroad Tycoon by pulling out all the major-line cards, and putting them out along with the starting bounty cards.
Draw two, keep one, to get your Tycoon card: instead of getting stuck with a Tycoon card that you really don't like at the start of the game, you can now have a chance to ditch one. This provides another, not so obvious benefit. You have more knowledge about what's not in play. If you have (for example) the "Best Engine" card and the "Least Shares" card, then this puts you in a powerful position, as these two goals are somewhat opposed to one another. The only double in the mix now is the Wealth card, and I'm not sure whether it's better to hope that you get both of them in the opening draft, or not (it's probably better to get both of them, so that you know that no-one else will be competing with you on that point). Again, I suspect that this is a technique we may want to try with the base game.
New turn order track on the board: what's the point of this? There's nothing in the rulebook about implementing an Age Of Steam style auction, so we didn't do that last night. However, given the increased importance of turn order (because the bounties are proportionally more vital in this game, c.f.), having an absolute ordering in the auction might be something interesting to try.
My first thoughts about this expansion is that it's a lot tighter than the base game, and this is probably a welcome change for those who prefer Age Of Steam. The tightness makes satisfying the major lines and tycoon goals more vital, and makes issuing shares in abundance even more dangerous. This also implies that, as with Age Of Steam, getting your income engine ramped up early is much more vital, making the service bounties even more valuable than they are in the base game. There are service bounties which could be satisfied on the first turn in some card draws that are potential game breakers. The player who won the turn auction on the first turn in our game, won the game by several lengths: coincidentally, he snapped up two service bounties on the first turn, netting him six points in the first turn. Although he sunk a lot of shares into infrastructure into the game early, this didn't harm him nearly as much as it might have late in the game, as only one other player was able to avoid the increasing share-debt problem.
If you like Railroad Tycoon, then Rails Of Europe is a highly recommended addition. It adds lots of value to the basic game, and is fairly well priced, all things considered. If you far prefer Age Of Steam and think that Railroad Tycoon is inherently unbalanced and soft, then you would probably be happier saving those dollars for (a) an Age Of Steam expansion mapboard, or (b) the new version of Age Of Steam, when it appears.
Container
I have a feeling that this game sold through more than it otherwise might have, being designer Delonge's farewell design before his untimely death. Typical of Delonge's designs, Container is quite abstract and has a fair amount of take-that-ness under the covers. The game is, essentially, an economic state machine. You invest money to build production infrastructure which produces cubes; you spend money on other people's cubes, and put them in your storage infrastructure (which also requires your investment); you spend money buying cubes from others stores to put them on your ships; you auction cubes off your ships and the winner of those cubes gets to use them for points at the end of the game. The values of cubes are known to you from the start, but everyone has a separate value chart, so some time is probably intended to be spent guessing what other players also value.
The various filters that a cube must pass through before you can score it are a bit bewildering, especially since players have the ability to vary the cost they charge you to use their filters. When is a cube worth the cost of acquiring it? It's also vital to remember that most of your purchases in the game do not contribute to your final score: they rather contribute to the processing/filtering that gets imposed on a cube (so you can easily invest heavily in cubes which contribute to other people's scoring). The trick here is to spend no more than you have to on the processing of cubes, and no more than you have to in the purchasing of cubes which you will finally be able to score at the end.
The game feels a bit like Giganten to me. Is it a good game? Yes, I think it is; it's challenging, well-balanced, and there's not much in the way of downtime. The theme pins reasonably well to the mechanics, and the components are reasonably nice (thank-you design genius Mike Doyle). However, will this game see lots of play? Like, Giganten, somehow I doubt it. In the end, it's rather abstract, dry, and the barrier to entry is a bit steep. Dos Rios is still, I think, Delonge's masterpiece and even that doesn't see much play at our table.
But is Container a good game? Yes. If you like complex economic "spend money to make money" games (and there are lots of folks who really do), then Container will probably tickle your fancy. Am I glad I own it? Yes, but it's proper place is likely in my overflow area, because I'm not sure I'm going to play it all that much. I'm much more likely to want to play something like Indonesia.
Race for the Galaxy
If Puerto Rico really were a challenging card game, then chances are it would be this game, and not San Juan (which bills itself as the Puerto Rico card game). San Juan is light, fast, simple to teach, and a great deal of its fun comes from those characteristics. Race for the Galaxy is, by contrast, not simple to teach or learn, is not particularly light, but is still fast, once you know what you're doing. As such, it's a bit hard for me to say whether this is a really good game or not. There are even more moving parts in this game than in Puerto Rico (or at least it seems that way), and the fact that you can't see all these moving parts throughout the game, makes the game much more challenging to get into. With Puerto Rico, all the buildings are in view all the time; every player has all the options in full view, all the time. In Race for the Galaxy, all the moving parts are written on cards, and so you only see a small number of the moving parts at once: the ones in everyone's tableau, and the ones in your hand. I suspect that for those people who play this game a good deal, it will be much, much more fun than for those folks who put it on the table rarely. And that's a shame, because part of Puerto Rico's excellence is (oddly) its accessibility.
Should you get this game? If you really like Puerto Rico and San Juan, and you don't mind a bit of frustration up front getting your head around things, then I think the answer is, "Yes". However, if you have a very large collection, and you like variety in your gaming, then I worry you'll never really enjoy this game, because (like some abstract strategy games, and some CCGs), I feel this game demands a certain amount of devotion to get the most out of it.