viktor_haag (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
viktor_haag) wrote2008-05-07 09:45 am
viktor_haag) wrote2008-05-07 09:45 am
Entry tags:
Recent played: Revolution, Year of the Dragon, 1825 Unit 3
The past few weeks have encompassed mostly games I've played before; however, a few I haven't played, and a few deserve special mention: Tresham's latest design, Revolution; Stefan Feld's latest design, Year of the Dragon and one of Tresham's great 182x project, 1825 Unit 3.
Revolution: Dutch Revolt
This is Francis Tresham's (creator of the great Civilization and 18xx game system) most recent game, and apparently was under development for a very long time indeed. It certainly has the feel of a smoothly and well-honed game. Our first attempt to play this was an abortive "play through one and a half turns" when the group gave up because of the length and confusion involved. Our second attempt featured a different set of players, players who had read the rules in advance and pushed counters about on the board (in isolation) a bit, and so we were somewhat prepared. The five player game took only four and a half hours, despite effectively teaching three of the players from scratch. Because the game's framework comprises a sizeable list of very small phases, I expect that a game involving experienced players would speed up greatly, and probably be put into the rough 300-400 minute range.
This game is really just a large, somewhat baroque, area majority game. But it also incorporates a number of subtle economic and interactive elements. Players are rewarded for careful, strategic management of a position: it's quite difficult in the game to make the sudden board-sweeping aggressive moves that often characterize the German-style game with a heavy emphasis on tactics as a mask for weak strategic designs. In Revolution, players can focus on building a strong centre and extending from that basic framework. The game also provides each player's faction with a different victory condition. Rather than the simple tack-on "bonus points" involved in many German-style games (hello, Railroad Tycoon, I'm looking at you) where the bonus points are so cosmetic as to be relatively ignorable, in Revolution, the victory conditions represent a substantial portion of your ending points and these combined with the faction's starting board position have a massive influence on how a successful player will direct the faction's strategy.
Tresham claims that the game is evenly balanced, and equally playable, at two, three, four, or the full five players (probably partly because there are always either three, four, or five factions in play, and each player always controls the same number of factions). The runaway leader problem endemic in so many German-style area majority games is subtly curtailed here: players don't accumulate points, as every round they score a point total afresh. What you then accumulate throughout the game that puts you in the lead is your strategy and your board position.
The game feels very even handed, however, as with many games with a strong strategic focus, if you make poor choices in the first half of the game, you may find that your tactical options are extremely limited in the second half of the game, and the hole you've dug for yourself is insurmountable.
This is not yet my favourite Tresham design: that still goes to Civilization. But it has all the hallmarks of a Tresham game: dependence upon discrete, very simple mechanics; richness coming from stringing all those mechanics together into the maintenance of a large state machine; strategic demands placed on players as they attempt to use the mechanics to gradually steer the course of their play over a reasonably lengthy playing time. Tresham games seem to almost scorn bold moves: they exist, but bold moves often lead to shocking reversals because they involve unbalancing one's position to one's detriment.
Revolution is an excellent game, but it's not for every type of player. If you like the crunchier Martin Wallace designs (Struggle of Empires or Byzantium), or if you like previous Tresham efforts (Civilization or any of his train games), then I can highly recommend this one. Make sure you download the revised edition of the rules from the web (the BGGeek has links) and the FAQ. There are lots of little twists and turns to the rules: they all make sense, but expect your first play to be slow, careful, and a bit confusing. As with most of his games, your best way to learn it, is to have an experienced player show you how.
1825, Unit 3
Tresham's latest 182x projects are in two groups: there is the modular, more tightly focussed 1825 series, and the sprawling, majestic (but a bit wonky) 1829 Mainline. 1825 comes in three basic units (named, plainly, Units 1, 2, and 3), with a wide host of add on bits and pieces (nearly all of which are out of print, so good luck there--I'm kicking myself for not simply buying "the whole magilla" when I got the three basic Units: it only would have added another fifty or sixty dollars or so to the cost).
Unit 1 (Southern England) has a comfortable base of four players, Unit 2 (Midlands), three players, and Unit 3 (Scotland and the North) is specifically built for 2 players. You can then add Unit 3 to Unit 2, or Unit 2 to Unit 1, or all three units together, to mix and match based on number of players, how long you wish to play, and so forth.
A few weeks back, our bi-weekly gathering amounted to two players, so we decided to try Unit 3 since I hadn't yet got it to the table. I don't know enough about 18xx games to comment authoritatively on it. However, I like all the 1825 units very much indeed. I like that there's no randomness at all (1829 Mainline has a slightly random procedure because it has a draw deck controlling what you can buy, when -- I don't mind this, but it drives some 18xx grognards to distraction, apparently). I like that the rules around trains and shares are basic and not baroque. I rather like the (reportedly a bit whacky) track-tile mix because of the clever shortages in some tile types and the "dead-ends" that some intermediate tiles present. I like the straightforward rules regarding towns and cities.
All this won't mean much to you unless you have played 18xx games, and if you've played more than me, then again, you might find these comments facile.
In the 182x games by Tresham, the game presents a small set of companies. Each player has the opportunity to purchase shares in train companies. It is the companies that build the track, buy the trains, and run routes for revenue. It is the players controlling the train companies that decide whether a company's revenue gets reinvested in infrastructure, or paid out in dividends to shareholders (players with shares in that company). It is the players with shares in a company that get rich whenever a company pays out dividends (and, at the end of the game, get richer because of the value of the shares they hold in companies). If a company reinvests profits in infrastructure, the share price suffers. When a company pays out dividends, the share price increases (sometimes dramatically).
Accordingly, the controller of a train company gets to decide, subtly, how fast a company's shares will rise in value and when shareholders will get value out of the shares they have bought.
There are therefore three different, inter-related, games going on in 18xx games: the game of managing one's portfolio (when do you buy shares? how many? when do you sell?); the game of managing a train company's finances so as to maximize your profit more than other shareholders; and, the game of managing the train company's infrastructure on the board to generate wealth (and thereby strategic position, and value) for a train company.
Players who like train-route-building games, and players who like stock market games, should be predisposed to like these games.
The 1825 units have (as far as I can tell) the advantage of providing wonderful play value in a compact package: not too much time, not too many baroque rules, not too nasty player interaction. A smooth, hearty bowl of beef and barley soup. They made a splendid introduction, for me, to the wider array of 18xx games with much longer playing times, and much more brutal and difficult rule-sets. Frankly, I'm quite happy that I own all these 1825 units, and feel no real need to expand beyond them yet.
Unit 3 was a very nice, but involved, two player game. It took us about four hours, teaching ourselves how to play, and paying especial attention to the slight rules differences involved in the game from the previous tries we had made with the other Units. With two players who know what they're doing, it would take about two-thirds that time, I suspect.
Do yourself a favour, though; whenever you play an 18xx game, play with poker chips (indeed, play any game with paper money with poker chips instead). It speeds up play immensely.
As with Revolution, 1825 Unit 3 might be a bit too heavy and long for some. However, again, if you like Age Of Steam, or one of the other, longer games by Martin Wallace; if you like any of Tresham's other designs; or, if you have a taste for the not-directly-a-wargame designs from the Avalon Hill era (Dune, for example), then I would highly recommend that you look into all three of the 1825 units. If you know that you play with two most often, then you could pick up Unit 3 in isolation, but if you have often have more than two, then you might want Unit 2 and 3, or all three of them. I think they're all three wonderful games.
Year of the Dragon
Stefan Feld seems to be the designer-du-jour of the Alea "big box" series of games: he's created the last three published, including the well received Notre Dame. The most recent one has a neatly pinned in Chinese theme (not deep, but as with lots of good German-style designs, rather well matched to the mechanics), and is really a game of crisis management. You can see all the crises you will have to deal with throughout the game's twelve turns. How will you plan your own resources, keeping in mind that your competing with other players, and the best resources are scarce?
I originally learned this game as a five player game, and it seemed good, but could be frustrating in groups with mixed amounts of skill. The teacher at that session assured me that this was also a good two-player game, and so I pulled it off the shelf and played with my wife one evening, to see what it was like in that context. I tried, when teaching it, to forecast the things you might want to pay special attention to. It seemed to me that the game was a lot closer, and had less of a runaway leader problem, with two players. The resources weren't proportionally quite so constrained it didn't seem. The end game in my second play was a lot closer than in my first, with five players, where I and two of the other newbies at the table made decisions early on that clearly nocked us out of the running and we saw no clear way to make up any kind of ground towards the end.
I think this is a good, but not a great game. There is no direct interaction with other players, but there is a wide array of subtle interaction as you're all racing to acquire similar resources. It's very difficult to directly pick on one other person, but it's certainly possible to side-swipe them by forcing them into sup-optimal expenditures of their resources.
Several tips that occurred to me after two plays: the turn-over-turn point generation options are very, very powerful if you can enlist them and protect them throughout the entire game. I think the most powerful of these is the Privilege tile, because once you've acquired it, you're never at risk for losing it. If you can see from the oncoming crises that you won't need money for at least three or four turns after the start of the game, then you should be absolutely sure you get a privilege tile of some sort, early on. The other turn-over-turn point generators have difficult drawbacks: the courtesan is an otherwise useless person tile, taking up building space, and in danger of being sacrificed to satisfy a crisis at some point; having too many palaces, too soon, is also a recipe for disaster, especially if the drought crisis comes up early on in the game.
The player that won in our five-player game, squeaked a win because he bought a two-point privilege tile in the first or second turn: this, therefore, gave him an irrevocable 22 or 24 points. Very sizeable. The second place player did not purchase a privilege tile until about two-thirds of the way through the game, and so it was worth much, much less. However, he did snap up a high priest, and keep him until the end of the game, and he also managed to secure a second high priest. These tiles were worth 8 points each to him at the end: they, plus the privilege tile made up almost to the 22-24 points the winner secured with his early privilege purchase.
Because the order of appearance for the crises in the game is randomly determined, and because there are so many ways of generating points (and with a separate system of maintaining initiative turn over turn, which I haven't talked about here), Year of the Dragon should provide a fair amount of replayability. It may not quite be in the same class as Puerto Rico or Princes of Florence, but it easily in the A- run of Alea big-box games and well worth your money, if you like those two A+ games (or Notre dame or Ra, which it is probably in the same class as).
Make sure you own Puerto Rico and Princes of Florence first. Then, you can't go wrong on this game as an addition to your collection.
Revolution: Dutch Revolt
This is Francis Tresham's (creator of the great Civilization and 18xx game system) most recent game, and apparently was under development for a very long time indeed. It certainly has the feel of a smoothly and well-honed game. Our first attempt to play this was an abortive "play through one and a half turns" when the group gave up because of the length and confusion involved. Our second attempt featured a different set of players, players who had read the rules in advance and pushed counters about on the board (in isolation) a bit, and so we were somewhat prepared. The five player game took only four and a half hours, despite effectively teaching three of the players from scratch. Because the game's framework comprises a sizeable list of very small phases, I expect that a game involving experienced players would speed up greatly, and probably be put into the rough 300-400 minute range.
This game is really just a large, somewhat baroque, area majority game. But it also incorporates a number of subtle economic and interactive elements. Players are rewarded for careful, strategic management of a position: it's quite difficult in the game to make the sudden board-sweeping aggressive moves that often characterize the German-style game with a heavy emphasis on tactics as a mask for weak strategic designs. In Revolution, players can focus on building a strong centre and extending from that basic framework. The game also provides each player's faction with a different victory condition. Rather than the simple tack-on "bonus points" involved in many German-style games (hello, Railroad Tycoon, I'm looking at you) where the bonus points are so cosmetic as to be relatively ignorable, in Revolution, the victory conditions represent a substantial portion of your ending points and these combined with the faction's starting board position have a massive influence on how a successful player will direct the faction's strategy.
Tresham claims that the game is evenly balanced, and equally playable, at two, three, four, or the full five players (probably partly because there are always either three, four, or five factions in play, and each player always controls the same number of factions). The runaway leader problem endemic in so many German-style area majority games is subtly curtailed here: players don't accumulate points, as every round they score a point total afresh. What you then accumulate throughout the game that puts you in the lead is your strategy and your board position.
The game feels very even handed, however, as with many games with a strong strategic focus, if you make poor choices in the first half of the game, you may find that your tactical options are extremely limited in the second half of the game, and the hole you've dug for yourself is insurmountable.
This is not yet my favourite Tresham design: that still goes to Civilization. But it has all the hallmarks of a Tresham game: dependence upon discrete, very simple mechanics; richness coming from stringing all those mechanics together into the maintenance of a large state machine; strategic demands placed on players as they attempt to use the mechanics to gradually steer the course of their play over a reasonably lengthy playing time. Tresham games seem to almost scorn bold moves: they exist, but bold moves often lead to shocking reversals because they involve unbalancing one's position to one's detriment.
Revolution is an excellent game, but it's not for every type of player. If you like the crunchier Martin Wallace designs (Struggle of Empires or Byzantium), or if you like previous Tresham efforts (Civilization or any of his train games), then I can highly recommend this one. Make sure you download the revised edition of the rules from the web (the BGGeek has links) and the FAQ. There are lots of little twists and turns to the rules: they all make sense, but expect your first play to be slow, careful, and a bit confusing. As with most of his games, your best way to learn it, is to have an experienced player show you how.
1825, Unit 3
Tresham's latest 182x projects are in two groups: there is the modular, more tightly focussed 1825 series, and the sprawling, majestic (but a bit wonky) 1829 Mainline. 1825 comes in three basic units (named, plainly, Units 1, 2, and 3), with a wide host of add on bits and pieces (nearly all of which are out of print, so good luck there--I'm kicking myself for not simply buying "the whole magilla" when I got the three basic Units: it only would have added another fifty or sixty dollars or so to the cost).
Unit 1 (Southern England) has a comfortable base of four players, Unit 2 (Midlands), three players, and Unit 3 (Scotland and the North) is specifically built for 2 players. You can then add Unit 3 to Unit 2, or Unit 2 to Unit 1, or all three units together, to mix and match based on number of players, how long you wish to play, and so forth.
A few weeks back, our bi-weekly gathering amounted to two players, so we decided to try Unit 3 since I hadn't yet got it to the table. I don't know enough about 18xx games to comment authoritatively on it. However, I like all the 1825 units very much indeed. I like that there's no randomness at all (1829 Mainline has a slightly random procedure because it has a draw deck controlling what you can buy, when -- I don't mind this, but it drives some 18xx grognards to distraction, apparently). I like that the rules around trains and shares are basic and not baroque. I rather like the (reportedly a bit whacky) track-tile mix because of the clever shortages in some tile types and the "dead-ends" that some intermediate tiles present. I like the straightforward rules regarding towns and cities.
All this won't mean much to you unless you have played 18xx games, and if you've played more than me, then again, you might find these comments facile.
In the 182x games by Tresham, the game presents a small set of companies. Each player has the opportunity to purchase shares in train companies. It is the companies that build the track, buy the trains, and run routes for revenue. It is the players controlling the train companies that decide whether a company's revenue gets reinvested in infrastructure, or paid out in dividends to shareholders (players with shares in that company). It is the players with shares in a company that get rich whenever a company pays out dividends (and, at the end of the game, get richer because of the value of the shares they hold in companies). If a company reinvests profits in infrastructure, the share price suffers. When a company pays out dividends, the share price increases (sometimes dramatically).
Accordingly, the controller of a train company gets to decide, subtly, how fast a company's shares will rise in value and when shareholders will get value out of the shares they have bought.
There are therefore three different, inter-related, games going on in 18xx games: the game of managing one's portfolio (when do you buy shares? how many? when do you sell?); the game of managing a train company's finances so as to maximize your profit more than other shareholders; and, the game of managing the train company's infrastructure on the board to generate wealth (and thereby strategic position, and value) for a train company.
Players who like train-route-building games, and players who like stock market games, should be predisposed to like these games.
The 1825 units have (as far as I can tell) the advantage of providing wonderful play value in a compact package: not too much time, not too many baroque rules, not too nasty player interaction. A smooth, hearty bowl of beef and barley soup. They made a splendid introduction, for me, to the wider array of 18xx games with much longer playing times, and much more brutal and difficult rule-sets. Frankly, I'm quite happy that I own all these 1825 units, and feel no real need to expand beyond them yet.
Unit 3 was a very nice, but involved, two player game. It took us about four hours, teaching ourselves how to play, and paying especial attention to the slight rules differences involved in the game from the previous tries we had made with the other Units. With two players who know what they're doing, it would take about two-thirds that time, I suspect.
Do yourself a favour, though; whenever you play an 18xx game, play with poker chips (indeed, play any game with paper money with poker chips instead). It speeds up play immensely.
As with Revolution, 1825 Unit 3 might be a bit too heavy and long for some. However, again, if you like Age Of Steam, or one of the other, longer games by Martin Wallace; if you like any of Tresham's other designs; or, if you have a taste for the not-directly-a-wargame designs from the Avalon Hill era (Dune, for example), then I would highly recommend that you look into all three of the 1825 units. If you know that you play with two most often, then you could pick up Unit 3 in isolation, but if you have often have more than two, then you might want Unit 2 and 3, or all three of them. I think they're all three wonderful games.
Year of the Dragon
Stefan Feld seems to be the designer-du-jour of the Alea "big box" series of games: he's created the last three published, including the well received Notre Dame. The most recent one has a neatly pinned in Chinese theme (not deep, but as with lots of good German-style designs, rather well matched to the mechanics), and is really a game of crisis management. You can see all the crises you will have to deal with throughout the game's twelve turns. How will you plan your own resources, keeping in mind that your competing with other players, and the best resources are scarce?
I originally learned this game as a five player game, and it seemed good, but could be frustrating in groups with mixed amounts of skill. The teacher at that session assured me that this was also a good two-player game, and so I pulled it off the shelf and played with my wife one evening, to see what it was like in that context. I tried, when teaching it, to forecast the things you might want to pay special attention to. It seemed to me that the game was a lot closer, and had less of a runaway leader problem, with two players. The resources weren't proportionally quite so constrained it didn't seem. The end game in my second play was a lot closer than in my first, with five players, where I and two of the other newbies at the table made decisions early on that clearly nocked us out of the running and we saw no clear way to make up any kind of ground towards the end.
I think this is a good, but not a great game. There is no direct interaction with other players, but there is a wide array of subtle interaction as you're all racing to acquire similar resources. It's very difficult to directly pick on one other person, but it's certainly possible to side-swipe them by forcing them into sup-optimal expenditures of their resources.
Several tips that occurred to me after two plays: the turn-over-turn point generation options are very, very powerful if you can enlist them and protect them throughout the entire game. I think the most powerful of these is the Privilege tile, because once you've acquired it, you're never at risk for losing it. If you can see from the oncoming crises that you won't need money for at least three or four turns after the start of the game, then you should be absolutely sure you get a privilege tile of some sort, early on. The other turn-over-turn point generators have difficult drawbacks: the courtesan is an otherwise useless person tile, taking up building space, and in danger of being sacrificed to satisfy a crisis at some point; having too many palaces, too soon, is also a recipe for disaster, especially if the drought crisis comes up early on in the game.
The player that won in our five-player game, squeaked a win because he bought a two-point privilege tile in the first or second turn: this, therefore, gave him an irrevocable 22 or 24 points. Very sizeable. The second place player did not purchase a privilege tile until about two-thirds of the way through the game, and so it was worth much, much less. However, he did snap up a high priest, and keep him until the end of the game, and he also managed to secure a second high priest. These tiles were worth 8 points each to him at the end: they, plus the privilege tile made up almost to the 22-24 points the winner secured with his early privilege purchase.
Because the order of appearance for the crises in the game is randomly determined, and because there are so many ways of generating points (and with a separate system of maintaining initiative turn over turn, which I haven't talked about here), Year of the Dragon should provide a fair amount of replayability. It may not quite be in the same class as Puerto Rico or Princes of Florence, but it easily in the A- run of Alea big-box games and well worth your money, if you like those two A+ games (or Notre dame or Ra, which it is probably in the same class as).
Make sure you own Puerto Rico and Princes of Florence first. Then, you can't go wrong on this game as an addition to your collection.