The Core Worlds

This weekend gone saw Birmingham hosting UK Games Expo, which I managed to attend for the first time this year.

The event is geared around four types of gaming.

• Video games (not what I expected and disappointing enough to not mention further… except that I’ve just found a photo that suggests there was more to it then I managed to find)
• Wargames (a fair amount going on, but a distinct lack of Epic — my current obsession
• RPGs — lots to see here. I managed to get a game of Paranoia in, and picked up copies of Savage Worlds and Starblazer Adventures. Savage worlds was cheap with a couple of fluff books that appealed to my desire to run Pulp games, while Starblazer takes my current favourite game system (FATE) and applies a space opera setting to it. Now I have many more games I wish to run.
• Boardgames…

Boardgames were the biggy here. I entered the Settlers of Catan competition and surprised myself by coming second. Meanwhile Declan won (no surprise there) but also pulled off first place at On the Underground and took the overall prize. Jim won Puerto Rico, and come top five in the Settlers and overall (he was the top player not to play in all three tournaments). My excuse for not doing well overall is that I only entered Settlers (quite a good excuse in my opinion), but next year I think I’ll take a punt at three.

This result means that the group of people that I play boardgames with most often were victorious at the majority of the tournaments, and took away over half the price money (or vouchers), which is impressive, but suggests we spend too much of our time doing this sort of thing.

Still, it gave me a change to pick up Days of Steam, a big collection of expansions for Zooloretto and Twilight Imperium.

With a weekend of boardgaming coming up in two weeks time (did I mention we spend too much time doing this?) I might be able to break some of them out and see how they play.

Wordpress 2.7 was released a while ago, but I thought I’d be clever. There was bound to be a security release a few days later.

A few weeks later?

No? Oh well, time to upgrade then. The Core Worlds is now on Wordpress 2.7 (my main site is still sitting around on sBuilder since I’m not finding a lot of time to work on Axford).

I’ve also switched in a new theme since the width of the old one was annoying me every time I wanted to pretty up a post with a graphic. Plugins have recieved a bit of maintainence too.

OK, end of boring technical post. Normal service resumes now.

I’ve seen a lot of commentary about D&D 4E’s skill challenges but I haven’t drunk that particular bit of Kool-Aid yet (probably due to my only time using them being near the end of a session when everybody was tired). On the other hand, I got to try out the Traveller rules for chained skill checks last night (the Mongoose Publishing edition if that makes a difference).

This is a simple mechanic that lets a series of actions, by various characters, build upon each other to effect the final outcome. Let’s run through an example from actual play to see how it worked for my group.

First, the objective: To include a consignment of post in our cargo when we make our next trip. The rules are this are nicely laid out in the core rulebook.

We wanted to try to trip the balance in our favour though, so we looked at ways we could persuade the postmaster that we were a nice trustworthy bunch who would be ideal to hand a massive box of mail to.

That would be a persuade check, but it might go more smoothly if we buddied up to him in a social setting. That would be a bit of carousing then.

The best place to do that would be to figure out where his local was and join him there. There are several ways our team could have done that, including being stealthy and following him, or investigating him. We eventually went with the option that best suited the skills of the member of our team who, shall we say, preferred to avoid legal entanglements.

The rest of that roll was compared to a table, which gave a modifier to the carousing roll, which applied to the same table to give a bonus to the persuade roll, and then to the final check to see if any mail was available for us to deliver.

Unfortunately, things didn’t work out and the last batch of mail had been shipped the previous night (that’s what happens when you miss the target number by one). Still, a certain postmaster really, really likes the diplomatic party member (that’s what happens when you roll a double six when you have a +6 modifier). Since we’ll almost certainly be coming back this way, it looks like a long term grav-tennis partnership might be forming.

I suppose I’d better say something about how I liked the rule, hadn’t I? I like it — it makes for a streamlined process of building a bit of story behind what would otherwise have been a simple dice roll, and it managed to introduce a bit of character development along the way.

I’m looking forward to the next game, when we blast off to take our cargo into a new system, and poke around the operations of a certain group that our patron is rather interested in.

With the competition over, we had time for another game of Dominion. This was my first time using a set up based on one of the sets listed in the rulebook. It took a lot longer to play, and was much more interesting as people had real choices (rather then one or two blindingly obvious moves). I didn’t manage to get my money running properly though, so never managed to buy any of the big Victory Point cards. Sam was the runaway leader in that game.

At this point we discovered that the rest of our party (ah, the joy of sharing a car) was just starting a game of Lord of the Rings. There was only one thing to do!

OK. I lie. There were two things to do. First, we ordered some food (It is quite handy that OxCon takes place in a pub that sells decent food).

Second, we played another game. I’m a big fan of Ticket to Ride, so I was quite happy to give the Nordic edition a try.

There are some good things to say about the changes to the basic game they made for this edition. The smaller board means that you can have a three player game and still use the double routes (which in other editions requires a four or five player game). The cards are very pretty (having art featuring snow covered trains) and spotting places where people I know come from is always nice (I have a fair few friends that hail from that part of the world).

Unfortunately, what they did to the rules was insane. The game has become massively overcomplicated. I’ll ignore a few minor points that serve to complicate things further, but my main bugbears were that:

Locomotives cannot be used as wild cards, except on routes involving ferries (where you can also substitute any three cards instead of a locomotive). On these routes you must play a minimum number of locomotives equal to the number of ferry spaces (with the three card substitution in effect for them).

Complicated? Yes.

There is also one route of nine spaces that is worth a whopping 27 points. This is a grey route, so you need nine cards of any one colour. It doesn’t use any ferries, so you can’t use locomotives as wild cards. However, it has a special rule, unique to that piece of track. Like ferry routes, you can discard cards which combined will count as a wild card. Unlike ferry routes, the number is four cards, not three.

The game also has tunnels (as in the Europe version of the game) which may require you to spend extra cards to complete a route (or be force to take the cards you have played back and waste a turn).

I thought the game was needlessly complicated, which is a shame as I really enjoyed the original, Europe and Märklin editions. I won’t be getting a copy of this one (I do want to get my hands on a copy of the Swiss edition to give it a try though).

I ended up winning it, but it didn’t feel like a satisfying victory. Having completed the three routes on my ticket cards, I noticed I had five red cards in hand and set about drawing enough to go after the nine route. Over the course of a few turns, I pulled out a sixth red card and enough detritus to build the route.

Two turns later, I had exhausted my pool of trains, which ended the game.

Since I had completed my tickets and scored the 27 point route, I had a lot of points - and since I had very rapidly pulled the game to a close, the other two players were left with a stack of incomplete tickets (which counted against their scores).

So I ended up having a run away victory thanks to one slightly sneaky tactic — it didn’t feel like a well earned win.

With great timing, the Lord of the Rings players managed to finish off their game and join us in time to watch the last two moves of the final round (along with the score counting).

This let us all head off with a minimum of waiting around. There isn’t much to say about that, except perhaps to comment on having an unlikely discussion about the gas mixes and pressure when diving, and how that relates to Dr Who, on the drive home.

It was a fun OxCon, and I’m sure I’ll be going along next year. Keep an eye on the website and see if you can make it. If you enter the competition, you can play a couple of great boardgames against people who are really rather good at them. Between rounds, or if you don’t enter, you can try out other games that people bring along with people who love boardgames. It’s a great way to discover a new game (or decide that buying the Nordic edition of Ticket to Ride would be a mistake!).

Well. Umm. The OxCon 2009 results have been published online and they disagree with the announcement on the day. I seem to have been bumped down to fourth and had my name misspelt.

I can’t claim to be really impressed by this.