Games played 2006

After sweating through the night to compile a difinitive list of all games played by the Billygamers in 2006 here it is for your perusal (well I knocked it up this morning actually). Quite a spread of different games played, only a few of them more than once.

Kremlin
El Grande
Clans
Caylus (3)
Karibik
Tower of Babel
E & T Card Game
Il Principe
The Bottle Imp (2)
Der Dreizehnte Holzwurm
Setters of Nurnberg
Power Grid/Italy
Ra (2)
Ticket to Ride Marklin
Stephensons Rocket
Industrial Waste
Thurn und Taxis (2)
Cleopatra and the Society of Artichects (2)
Age of Steam/China
Industria
Ark
Carolus Magnus
Cartagena
King Arther Card Game
Railway Rivals
Packeis am Pol
Kreta
Goa
Nautilus
Antike
Shark
McMulti
Heart of Africa (2)
Railroad Tycoon
Canal Mania
Masons (2)
Big City
Cronberg
Null und Nichtig (2)
Gheos
Taluva
On the Underground
Blue Moon City
Through the Ages
Leonardo Da Vinci
Power Grid/Benelux
Hameln (2)
Kampt um Rome
Ur (2)

When you look at it there aren't that many, I know a lot of you play tons more than that. But we only play once a week and as a rule the games must come in under 2 hours, anyway I enjoyed playing them all.....well nearly all.

Happy New Year!

First of all a Happy New Year to all of you that have read my blog during the past year. Thanks for reading. I know this is the first post for quite a while and I hope you had a great gaming Christmas. Myself on the other hand have played no boardgames at all, no Billygames sessions over the festive period, the first one of 2007 is next week. The only games I have played is some online Ticket to Ride and some Sit n Go Holdem Tournaments on Full Tilt. Not for real money of course......... that is grounds for divorce in our house!! But still enjoyable never the less. What amazes me is the passion some players have even though it's only play money, some of the language is quite appalling. I just sit there and have a quiet chuckle to myself, god knows how they would be if was real money.

Richard is once again hurling himself down a mountainside again, Austria this time I think. It's that time of year again so I expect he will be missing a few sessions as he skis round the world.

So I will post a report of our session next week.....er...... next week. Until then.

Happy Gaming!

12th December - Kampf um Rome

The last session before the festive season for me, next week I shall be really busy so very unlikely to have time for gaming. Anyway tonight we had a full compliment to play Kampf um Rome, the new Settlers of Catan variation. In this game you have a fixed map of the Roman Empire with hidden counters on each city. There are 5 resources, wheat, ore, horses, oxen and gold. Each player has 2 tribes, horsemen and warriors, these start in the NE corner of the board, and basically you move your tribes across the board looting the cities for the counters which give some benefits, gold, resources or development cards but also in most cases cause you to lose a man which weakens your armies. When you have at least counters in three different colours you can start to conquer the cities, when you do this your tribe stops moving and then conquers cities within one arrow away. You have to have an army equal in the strength to the number of watchtowers in the city.



It is an interesting decision when to stop pillaging and when to start conquering. I got the required 3 different colour counters for both my horse tribe and my warrior tribe, I had a development card which let me move anywhere on the board, so I moved my horse tribe to the middle of Spain and started to conquer cities from there. My warriors settled in Gaul and started their expansion there. One interesting thing is that once I had settled I had no gold and the only way I could get any was to do nothing in the build phases and either pick up 2 gold or a resource of my choice. I think I was the first to settle and start conquering, Richard started next, Steve third and Garry seemed to be quite happy to carry on looting!! With rules explanation the game lasted just on 2 hours which was OK. The scores where really close, with Steve just nicking the win.



I must say I enjoyed this Settlers variation a lot more than some of the others I have played. I usually get really useless die rolls and so not a lot of resources, in this game that didn't seem to happen, although I think Richard suffered in this respect a bit. There definitely wasn't as much trading between players in this game and my progress did stall a bit just after I started to conquer cities, you have to place a wagon and tribe member in each city as you conquer them, so you need to keep building them, and I didn't have the correct resources for a couple of turns.

Final Scores (money is the tiebreaker)
Steve 10, Richard 8(2), Garry 8(1), Colin 8 (0)

5th December - Ur

On the table tonight was one of the games I purchased at Essen this year, Ur, published by What's Your Game? and designed by Paolo Mori. Basically this game consists of 40 double sided tiles and number of cubes for each player. On each side of the tiles is depicted an action, Agriculture, Trade, Politics, Culture and finally War. . The tiles are laid out in a 6 x 6 grid with no tile the same as an adjacent one, and each player starts with a tile in hand. In your turn you are allowed to perform none, one or both of the actions depicted on the tile. If you only perform one action you can put an extra block on a tile you control, if perform none of the actions you can put 2 blocks on tiles you own or 1 block on any free tile. Finally at the end of your turn you exchange your tile for a free tile on the board, this tile cannot have the same pair of actions as the one you hold. Each action allows you to manipulate your blocks in some way or another. The objective is to control as many tiles as you can by the end of the game, you then put all the tiles you control into sets and score points according to the sets you can make up. You can only have a maximum of 5 blocks on a tile, you can also choose to build a ziggurat, there are 5 ziggurats in the game and when the fifth one is built that is one of the ways to end the game. To build a ziggurat you take replace the 5 blocks on a tile you control with the ziggurat and mark it with a block, this takes that tile effectively out of the game and cannot be affected by actions any more. You can only build a maximum of 2 ziggurats per turn. The other way to end the game is if you cannot exchange your tile with a different one from the board.


The Tile Grid

We managed to get in two plays of this game and as with most games the way to play the game becomes a lot clearer second time around. Steve and Richard homed in on the Agriculture tiles in the second game to get a lot of blocks onto the board quickly. The war action is very powerful as you can attack many times using one war action, a fact that Steve and I think Garry didn't realise until halfway through the first game. As the tile each player has is in view you know in advance what actions they are likely to take next turn which can be helpful. You also have to keep an eye on the ziggurats as they can get built quickly and the game is finished before you are ready.


A close up of the tile grid

I enjoyed this game although from my score you can see I did a lot better when I didn't really know what I was doing!!! There are many options available on your turn and as you have only 20 blocks available to you war and ziggurats are necessary to get some blocks back. All in all a game with a bit of meat on it that plays in an hour.

Final Scores - game 1
Richard 30, Steve 27, Colin 27, Garry 17

game 2
Steve 36, Garry 32, Richard 31, Colin 13

November 28th - Heart of Africa

This week Steve chose Heart of Africa, a game we played back in September. This Phalanx Game by Andreas Steding is about trading in Africa and trying to expand your holdings by kicking out neutral traders and the other players in the areas that produce the most VPs. Each commodity, gold, ivory, diamonds, ivory and the empty areas are given a random value at the start of the game and tiles depicting them are placed on the board at random. There is then an auction for a pair of tiles that have a number of action points on them and a special action. If you win the auction you can use either the action points or the special action, or save the tile for later. You can then use it for fighting another player or use the special action but lose the action points. The first player to 50 VPs wins the game, the rules say 42 but we decided 50 was a good number.


Final Board Position

Last time we played it I didn't do very well, Steve won with a score of 54and I came a distant fourth on 34. I hoped I would do better this time. Steve explained that the tiles with no special action and zero action points were pretty worthless (only useful for fighting), so we implemented a house rule that if one turned up for auction we rolled a 6 sided die to determine how many action points it was worth, this made the tile a lot more attractive and useful.
We all managed to win a couple of auctions and our scores were all around the 15-20 mark when Richard made a mega move and scored a load of points and he moved up to 44/46 points I think, just short of victory. I managed to make a similar move myself which put me one point behind Richard.


Garry was the only player to get his big dobber on the board

Then Steve won an auction and during his turn he attacked one of my territories that had a trading post in it, I retreated because I thought I could win the next auction and the resources I hoped I would get from Steve might help me to struggle over the line. In the event in the next auction Richard bid 20 and I only had 17 so I had to chip in with 4VPs to win it. One of the tiles allowed me to exchange a neutral trader with one of my own and I captured a gold province with that, and combined with my other provinces and the tile I won off of Steve which scored 2 VPs for every controlled province, I scored 16 points which put me on 58 and victory!

Final Scores
Colin 58, Richard 47, Steve 40, Garry 39

Game Free Week

Yup, no games session this week..... cancelled at the last moment due to work and illness. So what to do? Luckily I have just got the new Beatles CD, Love to listen to. I am a long time Beatles fan, I saw them live in 1963 at the Lewisham Odeon, I say saw advisedly because I never heard them much, only the girls screaming. But what an experience, I was only 15 and I have loved their music ever since. Love could have been a disaster, but George Martin who has a unique afinity to their music has done a fine job. I would love to go and see Cirque de Soleil perform to the music, but it's only on in Las Vegas. Doh! Perhaps it will come to London eventually.
So no games until next week, happy gaming until then.

14th November - Leonardo Da Vinci

So tonight Garry chose Leonardo Da Vinci, published by Da Vinci/Mayfair Games. I had read the rules twice during the day and I must admit the first read it didn't make much sense, anyway it became clearer as Garry started to explain the rules and set up the board. It took us nearly an hour to go through the rulebook, we decided to go straight into the advanced player setup with equal apprentices, florins and 3 favours each.



Each of us took a different mix of favours to start and I took 4 components, my other lab and an extra apprentice. It started to go downhill after that really, for me that is. I started to research an invention and when I had the required weeks research I declared I had finished and turned over the required components only to find I had put wood under the lab when I needed bricks!!! Doh! That set me back quite a bit as I was cash strapped for my next few turns. Steve was going down the ‘get as many apprentices as quickly as possible’ route. The mechanical men were quite popular quickly being taken. To be perfectly honest I played a pretty awful game and would definitly like to play again just to try do better. Richard realised near the end of the game that florins were in fact VPs and had been using them quite liberally, Garry had invented a number of nice contraptions and Steve had all 9 apprentices and some good inventions too. I on the other hand had not invented a single thing, only getting the lower value because everybody was inventing faster than me and picking the same ones as me.



Obviously this was only a learning game (I kept telling myself)), it seems to me that you have to be aware that the two research turns approach quite quickly and you need to prepare your components to take advantage of that, I of course did not do that...... Together with the rules explanation our game took nearly 3 hours, but I am sure that will come down a lot with the next play. The game does have some Caylus like mechanics and Steve did say he preferred it to Caylus.

Final Scores (bonuses for different inventions)
Garry 54 (8), Steve 47 (0), Richard 32 (8), Colin 20 (0)