The Core Worlds

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.

Sunday was the Settlers of Catan tournament. In 2007 I came 12th, last year I came 8th. I was hoping for a better result this time around.

First though, I managed to squeeze in a quick game of Galaxy Trucker before we were due to start. It’s a game I’ve played before, but not for a while – I’m going to have to make Jim dig his copy out next time we have a gathering of some description.

Settlers came and I didn’t do very well in the first game. It didn’t help that I got cut off from a build site I had built to (every painstakingly gathering up the resources) the turn before I had the chance to play the cards to build my second (not counting starting placement) settlement.

The most memorable game of the day saw me use a no more than one brick or wood as building material (I used lots of other resources though). When I did have brick and wood, it usually got traded away. I ended that game with three cities and sixteen development cards (one of which was Road Building, which is how I got the settlement without spending wood and brick on roads). That was one of the wins I’d managed to get.

I had a lot of close, tense games during the day, some of which didn’t end in time. I gather the day saw more time outs then any other OxCon. I don’t know why though.

Still, a game that times out gives you more tournament points then a loss, so it worked out relatively well for me.

I was also lucky enough not to be playing Markus (who has managed to win every year I’ve been and a number before that) or Declan (who had a pretty poor day).

So, I think it might have been more down to luck then skill that I managed to pull into third position (also known as second place discounting Markus).

I’ve got a lot to live up to next year though.

On Saturday evening, we broke open one of Declan’s purchases — League of Six.

I’m not really sure what to make of this one. It is an interesting game, but I don’t think any of the players in the session I joined had figured out how to play strategically when we had finished.

Each round starts by each player choosing which of six cities to tax (with some made unavailable by random selection, so there is one city per player).

Each city produces different goods, and random allocation of tax discs (which have different selection arrows) mean that cities don’t produce the same combinations each time).

Two players can’t tax the same city, but a player who goes later can start a bidding war with someone at the city they wish to tax. The person with the highest bid gives that many guards to the other player, who has to move (at a cost of one guard per space).

In theory, if you run out of guard cards, you can sacrifice points in order to acquire more to pay off your debt, but none of us did that as we had no shortage of guards.

I don’t know if that was due to us not having good enough strategies, of it is just an effect of playing on the basic boards (the six cities are double sided with one side being recommended for more advanced players).

Each player then turns the tax disc in their city to point at the goods the city produces which they want. Some goods are actual goods, which can be exchanged for points. Others add more guards or influence your turn order in the selling phase.

In the selling phase, each player picks a shelf (which has a number of slots on it, marked with a colour and a bonus score). They then fill as many slots on it as possible. The other players then take it in turns to score points for the remaining slots. If the shelf is filled, the person who selected
it gets the bonus.

This makes it a tricky business to try to score as many points as possible, while forcing other players to put their cubes in low value slots, and to make it impossible for other shelves to be entirely filled (to deny the possibility of the bonus to other players).

I’m not sure what to think of this game. I enjoyed the one shot I had of it, but I don’t know how it will hold up under continued play. I might have to see if I can find a strategy guide to see if I’m missing anything about it.

The weekend just past was the date of the annual OxCon event at The Mitre in Oxford. Since I’ve found out about it, I’ve tried to make it every year, and this was my third time there.

Saturday was Puerto Rico, and the less said about my performance there the better, it isn’t my best game, but I managed to make several boneheaded moves during the day that left me cringing afterwards. I didn’t bother to try to figure out my ranking.

Around the Saturday competition, we managed to fit in a few pick-up games. Dominion proved to be very good, at least initially. Describing it by comparison to other games is difficult, so I won’t try.

In Dominion, there are three types of cards (yes, it is a card game).

• Money
• Victory points
• Actions

These are all oragnised into piles in the middle of the table (one pile per card name. So all the Action: Market cards would be in one pile, and all the Victory points: 3 cards would be in another.

Each player starts with a seven of the cheapest money and three of the smallest victory point cards in their deck. These are shuffled and a starting hand of five cards is drawn.

Each turn a player can play and action card and then can buy one thing.

An action card will have one or more special effects. It might allow cards to be drawn, or allow a section action card to be played – but with double effect. Some will hurt other players (such as by making them discard cards from their hand) and some will be useless under current conditions.

When buying, a player looks at the number of coins in their hand, and then takes a card from one of the face up piles and adds it to the discard pile.

Then they discard their entire hand, and draw more cards. Play then proceeds to the left.

The game is one of balance and timing. You need to add money cards to your deck in order to afford more powerful cards, you also need action cards because their effects are so powerful. Of course, if you haven’t bought any victory point cards when the game ends (when three piles of cards, or the pile of Victory point: 6 cards, are exhausted) then you’re certainly going to loose.

The problem is that if you have too many cards that are not money, you won’t be about to afford to buy the cards you want (since your hand of five cards won’t have enough coins in it to afford the good stuff). The same problem applies to action cards.

This all means that it can become a fairly strategic game.

To make things more interesting, the game comes with something in the order of 25 different types of action card – but only 10 are used in any given game.

This means that the combinations of cards that are available changes, so games can be quite variable.

Unfortunately, when selecting the cards at random, we found that they would often turn up sets with one very powerful combination effect in them. When that happened, everybody would tend to blitz those two or three card types and the game would end very quickly and without a great deal of satisfaction.

We found it worked better using the preconstructed sets in the rulebook.

I don’t think I’ll buy this one, but I will play it again. Having had half a dozen games (more of them quite short), I’d suggest that every circle of gamers should have a copy. My opinion might change after I have another dozen games though.

Photo credit: Trevor Coultart