you might very well think so...

Scheduling variances allowed a near-impromptu gathering at the redoubt to play the latest addition to the Treefrog collection, Age of Industry. Problematically, even though I thought I was doing quite well, I actually got smacked squarely in the face and ended up in last place by a fair stretch. This leads me to believe that I can't really give any kind of reasonable analysis of the game's mechanical aspects. But I can make some commentary on the game.

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Anyone attending TABScon this weekend? Just curious.

Despite being called Power Grid - Factory Manager, Friedemann Friese's new game isn't all that related to Power Grid: it has auctions (although, in Factory Manager, the auction currency is tempo and not victory points--money), it's a game about the tension between infrastructure investment and profit-taking, and the player with the most money in the end wins.

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This evening, I played a quick game of Race for the Galaxy with my son. I have come to the conclusion that the extra supplement cards add flavour to the game, but they also vastly increase the luck factor in two-player games. Viz.

I managed, through blind luck, to start the game with New Sparta, three Rebel world cards, and a production halo world. Turn one, Settle, Consume-Trade. My son, nicely, explored on turn one: I drew a six point bonus card that benefitted Rebel worlds. On my first turn trade, I scored one more Rebel world card, a six point military bennie card, and another production halo world. Turn two was lather rinse repeat.

My poor kid didn't know what hit him. 15 minutes later, he notched up a respectable score in the mid-twenties (respectable for him when playing against a strong military hand that makes the game race through). I, on the other hand, ended with a score in the mid-seventies, without a single victory point chit. My largest point total to date, indeed, the largest point total I've ever seen. My son was very brave about it. I worked hard to convince him, and my wife, that it was really all complete luck in the card draw.

I still really like Race for the Galaxy, but the luck factor makes it not tremendously much more than a quick filler at this point, and my son's interest in the game has flagged somewhat. I suspect that soon, in order to dampen the luck factor, we're going to have to play with the extra rules in the supplements and not just the extra cards and the rules from the base game.

Still enjoyable, though; highly recommended game, and great value for the money.

This Sunday, four of us tried out Uwe Roseneberg's recently published At the Gates of Loyang, a game about the economies of planting, harvesting, and selling vegetables. In tone, to a certain degree, this game feels a bit like a cross between Container, Antiquity and Agricola.

The game lasted much longer than it should have (first time, though) and the mechanical changes to accommodate four players seemed a bit weak. I suspect that this will be principally a three player game that can stretch to two or four. Not like Agricola and Le Havre which can genuinely be played with a different feel with two, three, or four players.

There are less moving parts to Loyang than to Rosenberg's later designs (though published before Loyang), but Loyang offers a clever economies game with a nice degree of interaction thanks to the action cards (specifically, the "helper" cards). Loyang feels more abstract, but also purer and simpler, while still presenting a bit of the crazy interactive variety that Rosenberg presents through "power cards" in the later two designs.

Loyang is available as an import in a quite small print-run. I suspect it's destined to become one of those collector objects that's overvalued much beyond its actual play value. It probably is not worth the cost unless you're a completist, or a huge fan of Rosenberg's designs and economic games like Container. It is a good game, but not as good as the two games Rosenberg went on to design afterwards: Agricola and Le Havre.

This weekend was the first in a while for a Sunday boardgame afternoon. This weekend, we played a five player, full game Le Havre, and then followed up with a game of El Grande.

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This weekend was good for boardgames. On Friday night, we played Wallace's recent redux published by Mayfair, Steam. On Sunday afternoon, Wallace's most recent Treefrog release, Automobile. (We also played Caylus, but I've not got much to say about that.)

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Small turn out this weekend at the Redoubt, but I was eager to start prying my money's worth out of Duck Dealer, so we tried it out with two players. After that, we got one more player and had a three-handed Agricola session.

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In a coda to saying farewell to the Resident Train Guru (thanks to paperwork snafus), last weekend we decided it needed to be all Splotter all the time, so we put their two newest titles onto the table: Duck Dealer and Indonesia.

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On the weekend, by special request, we put Roads & Boats on the table. R&B feels a lot like what happens when you get a bunch of hard-core 18xx players together, introduce them to Settlers of Catan, and then ask them to "improve" it in any way they'd like. What you end up with might be a four-hour long, bootstrap-your-economy type game that involves building infrastructure to generate resources, get more resources, spend them on buildings, and over the course of the game set yourself up to get lots of points (because points mean prizes).

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