Saturday Morning Gamer

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4 January 2003

It's a new year, and that means new opportunities for gaming. If you're not playing as many games as you'd like to (and remember that games have many more redeeming qualities than many other forms of entertainment... television, for example) then make 2002 the Year of the Game. Heck, maybe it's even time to start your own game club.

Games I'm Playing

We had a great Saturday of gaming last weekend, visiting Tom and Dana again with Mark and Amy joining us. Here's what hit the table:

Fossil

This game, which won Games Magazine's Game of the Year award when it came out (1998), leans toward the abstract side of gaming.

Players compete to assemble fossils, each of which has nine parts. The more pieces you get of one fossil, the higher your score. But at the same time, if you have no pieces of a fossil, the player who has the most of that fossil will earn bonus points. There's a very real need to balance those two elements.

To obtain a fossil piece, you move one of two stones orthogonally as many spaces as you want. But for every fossil piece you skip, you pay a price of one point.

Mark won mainly on the strength of two fossils in which he did particularly well. Beth's strategy was to have at least one piece from each fossil, but that didn't work out as well as she hoped.

Results: Mark, 112; Amy, 93; Dana, 84; Erik, 82; Beth, 72

Seafarers of Catan

This was the freakiest Catan game I've ever played, and probably the second freakiest game ever. (The freakiest would be a game of Can't Stop in the spring of 2002 which I won without the other players ever having a chance to roll.)

Mark jumped out to a lead, developing the largest of four available islands. Before we knew what hit us, he was developing resources on just about every roll, and sped to a dominating victory. (He never built a ship, so the pirate didn't come into play, and in the scenario we used the robber didn't exist.) For most of the game, Tom, Dana and I just sat there slack-jawed and trying to figure out how we could possibly be so bad. Naturally, we didn't want to admit that Mark was that good.

And when you look at the scores, keep in mind that you start with two points. As Tom said, he and Dana scored the equivalent of 400 on the SAT. I scored barely better, sneaking in a second settlement not long before Mark's victory.

Results: Mark, 12; Erik, 3; Dana, 2; Tom, 2

Cranium

Cranium is the fastest-selling game in history, a party game that mixes elements of Pictionary, clay sculpting games, charades, trivia games, and more.

Results: Mark, Tom and Erik defeated Amy, Beth and Dana

Liar's Dice

I'd pulled out Sid Sackson's classic dice game Can't Stop a few weeks earlier, and judging from the reaction to it figured that Liar's Dice would also be a hit -- which it was. Endless Games recently put out a new edition of Liar's Dice, and it's also available under the name Perudo from Reveal Entertainment.

We played three games with four players, and only Tom didn't win. Does that mean he's the most honest among us?

Results: Erik won with 5 dice; Beth won with 2 dice (second game); Mark won with 3 dice (third game)

Bohnanza

The best bean-farming game ever. This clever card game incorporates a counter-intuitive mechanism that takes a little while to feel comfortable with: you can't sort the cards in your hand; you must play them in the order you draw them.

As this was the last game of the night and it was getting a bit late, we only played once through the deck (instead of the three times required by the rules), enough for everyone to get the hang of the game.

Results: Amy, 11; Erik, 9; Tom, 8; Mark, 7; Beth, 6; Dana, 6

On New Year's Eve, Beth and I played a pair of two-player games:

War and Sheep!

This new two-player game is decidedly light, but a fun way to pass 15 or 20 minutes. War and Sheep! finds players controlling rival flocks of sheep, competing to eat the best grass and avoid the wolves.

One of the options available on a turn is to do recon -- to look at a face-down grass tile without revealing it to the other player. So far, I haven't figured out a reason to use recon. Granted, there are two wolves hiding under the grass tiles, but the overwhelming likelihood is that you'll earn points by eating grass if you move a sheep onto a face-down grass tile. Anyone who uses recon effectively, please let me know what I'm missing!

In our game, Beth's sheep thoroughly dominated my sheep.

Results: Beth, 25; Erik, 13

Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation

The easiest comparison to make for LotR: The Confrontation is Stratego, but that doesn't do it justice. The additional elements -- each piece has unique powers; each player has a separate deck of cards -- make it much more than that. Some believe it's the best two-player game published in 2002, and I'd be hard-pressed to argue the point.

As this was our first play, we used a fairly random setup, just wanting to understand how the pieces interact. In fact, it turned out to be a very close game. In the end, Frodo made it to Mordor.

Results: Beth won as the Good Player

Games I Can See While Sitting At My Computer

It's still pretty clean around here, with just three new games and one classic in sight.

• Wheedle, from Out of the Box (a relative of Pit, but designed by Reiner Knizia so it has much more interesting scoring)

• Odin's Ravens, from Rio Grande Games (ravens race with a Norse mythology setting)

• Cave Troll, from Fantasy Flight Games (players search a dungeon for gold and artifacts; designed by Tom Jolly)

• Intrige, from FX Schmid (a nasty game of bribes in which you don't have to honor deals)