The Core Worlds

I picked up a copy of Blood Bowl for the XBox 360 at the weekend. It gets the dubious honour of being the first game that I pre-ordered for the platform.

I haven’t been about to give it much of an outing yet — I had a weekend full of friends visiting, movie watching, Dragonmeet attendance, and GMing of Fantasy Craft — but I did manage to squeeze in a couple of games last night.

I started out attempting the tutorials, but they seemed geared up more to teach Blood Bowl then the control system the game uses, which I felt left to figure out for myself (possibly I just wasn’t looking in the right places).

Once you get the hang of it, the controls are pretty easy. Point to where you want the action to happen, click, and the system figures it out. So click on a square to run to it, a teammate to pass, an opponent to block or blitz and so on. Just don’t get scared off by the range finder when you have the ball, clicking an empty square will still move to it.

So, with the controls figured out, what next?

The AI seems pretty easy, but that could be a combination of using the default settings, having played the boardgame version before and possibly finding “my team”.

I’ve never given Chaos an outing before, but they have a nice balance of stomp and speed. We’ll have to see how they handle themselves if they come up against a Dwarf team (who are as stomping as you can get but about as fast as an injured snail).

The fluff is good too. It has nice graphics and amusing commentary.

Overall? I’m looking forward to getting into it a bit more, and then venturing out onto XBox Live to see how I handle myself against intelligence that isn’t artificial.

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.

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!).

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.