Last week was a great week for gaming for me. One reason was that the mid-summer fest here in Finland gave us a four day weekend and I spent it in Porvoo with family. There were so many good games that I will have to break this down to many blog posts, where I talk about specific games. Here is the rundown of what was being played:

• 4 x Ubongo
• 3 x Looping Louie
• 2 x Power Grid
• 2 x Jenseits Von Theben
• 2 x Backgammon
• 2 x For Sale
• 1 x Age of Empires III
• 1 x Relationship Tightrope
• 1 x Zooloretto

A tip for those that try to game with their non-gamer family members: Have games available of different length and that play with different number of players. This was my secret of being able to play a lot during the weekend. I always had something to offer, from Looping Louie to Power Grid. Nice thing to notice was that everything got played quite equally. I have been training my family well ;)

What has been the game you have played the most lately?

You might have already spotted the news that Zooloretto wins the grand prize. Spiel des Jahres is easily the most coveted boardgame title.

I’ve had a chance to play Zooloretto for two times now. They both have been okay experiences, but I found myself wanting something more. It just wasn’t that exciting gameplay for me. One thing that particularly bugged me is the fact that you are trying to hoard a lot of similar animals to your zoo, instead of trying to have a lot of different kind of animals there. At least that’s what I like better when I went to Zoo’s as a child.

But I can understand why it won. The theme is very cute, it will certainly be appealing to families, game time is not too long and so on. This just shows me that I am not the target group for SdJ – I care more about IGA (International Gaming Award).

Congrats to Michael Schacht for designing the game and for the rest of the crew as well. Congrats to Lautapelit.fi for publishing the game in Scandinavia way before it was even nominated. They sure have

The boardgame version has been getting very good reviews and ratings and it’s theme is close to our game in design, Cuzco, so I have been wanting to play this for a while now. Yesterday I finally got the chance to do so. Thank you Nokia guys! I won’t go over the details of the rules, because there are plenty of other reviews that do that already. I will try to concentrate on how I felt playing the game, what I liked and disliked.

Our gameplay

My initial thought was that there is a lot of bits and pieces! It took us some time to have everything setup. Everything looked beautiful and I was really excited to play it. It took us quite long to have the rules explained (one of us had read them before) and the first two rounds took long, because no one was really sure what was the best thing to do. After that the game started to flow better. We also noticed the typical problem with games that doesn’t have clockwise turn orders: A lot of time was spent because We were waiting for someone to notice that it’s their turn. It got better when we made a house rule that whoever was done with their turn had to say the next person’s name out loud.

After the first age, we had the gameplay down, but pretty much all of us looked like they weren’t having that much fun. The placing of colonists started to feel a bit repetitive and not that much was going on. It was the end part of the second age when things started to get more exciting. We all had found somewhat different strategies to pursue and the New World scoring was a lot more interesting than after the first age.

The third age everyone was looking for ways to score some extra VP’s and you had to fight a little bit more to achieve things. It was a good thing. For some reason I was left to do my things and was able to execute my actions almost exactly like I wanted. It confirmed my win, but I might have enjoyed it more, if it would have been more challenging. In the end of the game I got 30 out of 50 points scored from colonization scoring and won with 107 vp’s while the next had 69 vp’s. The rest of the players finished quite closely to each other. I liked how the final score is not really sure until the very end.

Theme

The theme is awesome. I didn’t feel like the theme was transfered as well as I thought it would. It felt a bit mechanical to me. It didn’t bother me too much though, I’m more of a mechanic-lover anyways. I couldn’t help but have thoughts like “This placement is similar to Davinci/Pillars/Caylus”, “oh, that’s kind of like El Grande scoring” and “ahh, these end game buildings remind me of Puerto Rico”. The mechanics worked nicely though and they have been integrated to the game well.

Exploring

I was expecting more exploring, but the discovering was fairly abstract: You just decide how many colonists you go with (from the discovery box) and then flip the card over and see if you had at least the same amount of colonists than there were natives. If yes, then you get some gold and end game VP’s. It just wasn’t as exciting as I was hoping for. As a mechanic, it worked just fine. I found myself always discovering at least with five colonists just to be on a safe side.

Specialists and warfare

I liked the specialists. They added a great deal to the otherwise little repetitive colonist placing, which is the core of the game. I had some buildings that produced me specialists every round and it seemed to be a very good thing. I also liked how warfare wasn’t the main thing, but was still an option. It was an option that only I used in our game. I managed to get a couple more majorities because of that. We didn’t have any wars, just a couple of battles.

Trade goods

I went early on to get some trading goods and managed to get two sets of 4. After that I decided to concentrate on other things. I thought trading goods as a good mechanic for the game, but collecting sets is quite abstract way to handle trading. The only difference with different trade good was the amount of them in the game.

Conclusion

I liked the game with some reservations. I will have to play more to figure out my final say on the game. If the next couple games turn out good, I might buy it. It is a solid game, that has abstract mechanisms hidden beneath a beautiful theme. For now, I will give it 8.

Would you like it? If you liked the games that this has been compared to, Caylus, Pillars of Earth and Leonardo DaVinci, I think you will like this one as well. Especially if you like the theme. It might not be suitable for you, if you prefer euro games that take only 45 minutes or so. This one definitely takes longer than that.

Cuzco Comparison

Others have asked me if it’s close to our game in design, [url=http://cuzcobg.wordpress.com/]Cuzco[/url]. My opinion is that the only similarities are theme based. The game play is totally different.

After a long sleep, Wallenstein sees a return to our gaming table. When I first got it I was afraid my family would not be willing to play it due to it’s long length. How wrong I was! It was a smash hit, even my older brother’s wife loved it so much that they bought it as well. We played it almost every Sunday. This year we haven’t been gathering together for so long and thus not being able to play Wallenstein. Yesterday was an exception and I took my copy of Wallenstein with me just in case.. and it worked! We had a very nice and tight game.

We had one new player who figured out the rules fairly quickly, rest of us have had 10+ games played before. Jyri found a nice eastern corner and scored a massive 30 points for the first year and it was looking like he is winning easily. The rest of us where fighting in the wheat-heavy region (Gft Mark/Luneburg/Paderhorn). Our points were 22 (me), 17 (Ed, the new guy) and 13 (Vesa).

Things got a little better when Vesa declared that we should strive for a peace and try to strike Jyri the best we could. I took the offer straight away – Vesa was so much behind that I didn’t consider him so much of a threat, but something needed to be done to Jyri. Luckily Jyri ran out of money on turn 4 and missed getting extra troops. Because of that we were able to capture some of his buildings, but we were not sure if it would be enough.

The end points were 49 (me), 48 (Jyri), 42 (Ed) and 41 (Vesa). So after all, a very close game with many agonizing decisions. When we asked Ed how he liked the game, he said: “It was fun, annoyingly fun”! I think that summarizes it for me too. There were many times when I was frustrated and sure I don’t stand a chance to win or when I just didn’t have enough actions to execute all that I needed to be done. I think therein lies the greatness of this game for us.

Other than that, my game week was a disappointment. I guess the summer is having an effect to gaming as well. I played a couple of For Sale’s again and it is still lot of quick fun. It was quite random with 6 players, but then again, I think it was more fun as well. I guess it depends on what mood do you play. Do you play to win or do you play to have fun. And for me quick fillers should be played more with the “have fun” -attitude.

I thought it would be nice to keep a gaming calendar and reflect back on what I played last week. So this is an attempt to do this. Maybe these are mostly for myself, but maybe someone will be interested to see them as well. The Internet is full of people that like even weirder things :)

• 2 Cuzco playtest. These were the definite gaming highlights for me this week. It was a really good week for Cuzco.
• 1 Zooloretto. It was my first game and I liked it. It was quite cute and mechanics worked nicely. Somehow it just didn’t get me hooked, so I gave it only 7. It could easily become 8 for me, but we will see. It just now one of those “I won’t buy it, but I will play it gladly when someone suggests it” -type of game. I wouldn’t be surprised if it would win this year’s SdJ. It’s certainly attractive family game.
• 1 For Sale. I borrowed this one two weeks ago and I have played it with my family. It has gotten a very good response. It feels like they have started to dread the Sunday’s when I pull out the new cool game and they need to learn yet-new-set-of-rules :) For Sale was able to break that. In fact my brothers wife just bought this to him, so that is a very good sign. The game was an exciting one too and I lost the game by one. The highlights for me was getting 14 with number 7 and getting 0 with number 25!
• 1 Cluedo. I have a reputation to buy games as gifts to my family members, so I had to live up to it and buy a travel version of Cluedo (it was cheap!) to my brother. On sunday night we finally got a chance to play it. We probably played some rules wrong, but it worked okay. I remember liking it a lot as a child and playing it now brought back some memories. For me, the game wasn’t all that exciting, but all the rest seemed to like it a lot. I won’t mind playing it again when they request it, but I will make sure I have something else to offer as well :)

That was it for the week 23. Not that many games played, but I’m more than happy with those 2 Cuzco playtests for the week. Zooloretto was a nice bonus as a new game as well.

I recently rated all the games I can remember playing in Boardgamegeek. It brought a couple of thoughts to my mind:

1. There are a lot of games that I see as “ok” -games, which got ratings 6-7, some even 8. But there seems to be very narrow group of games that I have truly enjoyed and still keep enjoying. I want to find out what do they have in common – what makes a great game for me. Do you know what are the ingredients that make a great game for you?
2. The main idea was, that there really are different kind of gamers:

• Those that are always wanting to try something new (this is probably me)
• Those that have only a few games, that they play over and over again
• Those that love to own as many games as they possibly can, but won’t necessary have time to play them many times (if at all!)

Can you find more stereotypes of gamers? Can you categorize yourself into one of these?