The Core Worlds

Could I resist picking up a few games at Oxcon? Of course not. The first of these was Murdero, a game where you collect cards to make runs. It is reminiscent of Rummy.

The production values of the set are pretty high. The cards feel decent, with (usually) amusing captions and nice photographs, all of which keep with the theme (20s crime).

The main let down is the rules, which are a little unclear in places and fail to cover the second of two ways that a hand can end (this way is spelled out in the FAQ on the website though).

On to the game play. The objective is to collect case files (numbered one to five) in each of the three suits (Mafia, Hollywood, and Politics). Each suit has five ones, four twos and so on.

When you play a card, it is worth its face value, but you can’t play a card if you haven’t already played a card with a value of one less in the same suit. (So given a hand of Mafia 1 / 3, Politics 1 / 1 / 2 / 3, you could play all four Politics cards, but only the 1 in the Mafia cards).

The hand ends if anybody plays the 5 card in a suit (which also scores them double points for the hand), or if the draw desk is exhausted.  Cards left in hand at the end count against the score.

The game is spiced up by a number of cards with a face value of 0, which have a special effect such as allowing you to draw extra cards, or preventing the hand from ending if someone completes a given suit. This makes the game rather more interesting.

Murdero is a pretty quick game, which makes it good for killing the second half of a lunch hour, but it high on luck and doesn’t have a vast amount of strategy, so I don’t think it would suit frequent play.

Overall, I’d give it five out of ten.

The Sunday session of OxCon left very little time for anything except the competition itself. Catan is one of the most popular serious boardgames, so more people entered and we had five rounds to play through.

Much of the rest of this post will make little sense if you don’t know the game. If you are unfortunate enough to be in that situation, make it a point to learn to play. It is an excellent game, and you can play online.

I started out the day with two wins. The first was a very tight game which I only managed to scrape a win thanks to my development card draws turning up two Monopoly cards, a Year of Plenty, three victory points, and just two Soldiers.

My second game saw me going last, on a really nasty board. In desperation I put my starting settlements on a triple grain space and a triple ore space, with only one 6/8 between them. Somehow, this managed to pay off, quickly netting me two cities before I built to a 3:1 port.

We then broke for lunch, with me floating on something of a shocked high.

The first game of the afternoon saw me in a game including the infamous Markus Welbourne (who usually wins this tournament). I was quite happy to come away from that game in second place.

The last two games, were not ones that really qualify as “bad”, but they weren’t great either.

Despite that, my earlier results managed to pull my score up, so I finished a very respectable 7th out of 32. My one regret is that in the last game I held a Soldier card back as I was getting close to winning and feared being attacked by the Robber. If I had played it, I’d have won Largest Army and scored enough tournament points to bump me up to position 6. Unfortunately, another player managed to grab Longest Road (which I’d already convinced myself that another player was going to get) and build enough to jump him from behind to 10 points, and I ended the game with 6 rather than 8.

The winner? Markus Welbourne.

I like Puerto Rico, as games go it doesn’t have a lot of randomness, and the game play varies depending on which tactics other players use. This means that no two games are the same. Unfortunately, it seems that I don’t play it enough, my performance this year was rather worse then last. I think more practice will be in order before I attend next year.

The 15 to 1 quiz, on the other hand, was a lot of fun, and I certainly did better then last year.

Between the two organised events, I managed to squeeze in a game of Traffic Lights. It was enough to convince me to never play it again, and certainly not buy it. It is a glorified game of noughts and crosses, with the objective being to be the last person to get too bored to concentrate on the play area (and thus fail to spot a move that needs blocking).

As usual, there were a number of games for sale, so I’ve taken note of a number which I shall be checking out on Board Game Geek before deciding which to splash out on.

I’m posting this at some horrible hour on Saturday morning as I prepare to leave for OxCon. Hopefully the traffic isn’t going to be too bad, and I can improve my scores over last years efforts. Wish me luck.