Math Bad!

I am going to go out on a limb and say that for any game designer you will have a much better success at designing games if you have a strong background in math.  It helps with more than you will ever know.  Take it from a guy who struggles with math, I waste a lot of time trying to solve problems that can almost always be handed by a moderately difficult math equation.  I end up doing more iteration because I don't do a great job of figuring out the math issues early on.  This leads to some wasted time and frustration.  Learn from me and get a healthy does of advanced math skills before you leave high school or college.

I bring this up because I played Automobile last night and fought myself to pay attention and understand what I needed to do all night.  It's a deep and complex game with lots of statistical and analytical thingking.  Players are trying to build their Auto Manufacturing company by building factories, manufacturing cars, managing Car Sales Men, using the Characters Special abilities (which can change every turn) to their maximum effect.

Bryan (center) teaching the Rules of the game.

You have money that is a lot in the first and second rounds but is gone after that and is near impossible to get back. I made several big mistakes but they were all based on assumptions about how the game worked and how stiff the penalties were.

An unknowing Me, about to get my ass handed to me! 

Late in the first round I used a special phase of the game to shut down my factories and avoiding the penalties I would have got for having the lowest technology Car Factories.  But I didn't do the math to calculate how much money the factories would be making for me and that I could have waited to sell the factories until turn two, making a lot more money.

In the end it came down to math.  The two guys who did the best were the math experts, correctly calculating how many cars they could manufacture and effectively sell, gaining the highest profits, allowing them to buy more factories and sell more cars.

Apparently Bryan doesn't know how to take a non-blurry picture of me.

Automobile is a cool game and I would play it again, but I don't think I would go back to it often.  It is the start contrast to my game, Taipan, which has a fair bit of hidden and random elements.  Speaking of which, I am having a hard time getting the new Data Sheets set up properly.  I have made so many changes that the Cards for Taipan have become so significantly changed on the Data side, that I have to clean up the Photoshop files before they will read properly.

As a bonus, check out this insane pistol that shoots shotgun shells.  This is Ben (Bryan's son) holding the monster of a gun.  That thing is almost as big as he is!

Heres me, a 6'4 reasonably muscled guy having a hard time even holding the thing.  Aiming it causes my hand to wobble from the weight.  Maybe I should have cheated like Ben and used both hands!  ;p

Another round of gaming!

Its rare for me to get this much gaming in such a short period of time.  I have a feeling I better enjoy it since it will come to a screeching halt in January.  In the early part of the day I went to a co-workers house to play some games and then later that night I went to Ziggy's Tavern where they have board games every Tuesday.

After a bumpy start we played Blue Moon City.  This should have been a fast game but I hadent read the rules or played in a long time so I was a bit rusty in getting it set up and started.  This is an interesting game where tiles are placed down on the brown unpainted side to represent a once great city that suffered a catastrophe. The players are rebuilding the city, working together in a way, but ultimately they are trying to gain enough influence that they can make the most offerings the Obelisk at the center and be placed in control of the city.

The game is played with Pawns which are moved around the city, and Cards which are used as a resource to rebuild the city, and as special abilities.  The abilities are triggered by discarding the card and range from extra movement, convert cards into wild cards, and move Dragons.  The Dragons are helping the players rebuild the city and give the players golden scales for each part of the city they repair in the dragons presence.  The scales, once the pool is depleted, are converted to Crystals.  When a City Tile is completed it is flipped over and the reward for completing the tile is given out to each player who contributed.  The other side of the tile has a bonus that will be given to each adjacent city tile that is completed from her on out.

In the end the player wants to take his Crystals that he gets for completing each city section (with bonuses for adjacent tiles already flipped over) to the center and make an offering to the Obelisk.  The first person to do that 4 times wins. I tried a strategy that while I think would have been good, did not work out for me this time around.  In the end I lost to a player who is fairly new to the Board Gaming experience.  Good game Kyle.

Next we played Eclipse.  We knew we were going to have limited time with this one and only after we had gotten into it did we think that we should have played this game First, and then played another if we had time.  Oh well....next time we will know better.

After an hour and  half of learning the rules and set up, we start playing. I am not going to try to explain the rules of this one....it would take forever and this Blog post would be 5 times longer.  Basically you all place different Galactic Empires on the path of conquest.  

Very quickly the galaxy starts to get explored.  The turns go quickly at first and you don't need to worry to much about to much resource management.  Managing your resources (Money, Science, and Materials) you will be able to Explore, Build Ships, Upgrade, Research Technology, and Colonize worlds.  Its incredibly complex but plays very smoothly.  After 3-4 rounds of exploring we start to run out of money and have to start focusing on other aspects of the game.

With the galaxy's farthest reaches explored, the players turn their attention towards the coveted middle of the board and start building up their forces for the inevitable conflict that will soon begin.  The alien worlds that frightened us when we didn't understand how combat worked no  longer worried us and they soon fell.  Ryan found an alien world with "Shard Hull" that he put on his ships.  This gave his ships +3 hull early on.  As far as I can tell, that was very broken and let him start marching over the other alien worlds that had more alien tech and valuable resources.  

Unfortunately I could not stay to the end of the game and will have to hear about the outcome tomorrow.  I had a great time and want to play this game again.  At $100 I don't imagine that I will every buy this game for myself, but it was a lot of fun and cant wait to do it again.

After going home and taking care of some errands, my girlfriend said that she was tired and had to get up early so she was going to bed.  This gave me an opportunity to go to a local place called Ziggy's Tavern that I know has board games every Tuesday night.

I got there late so many games were already well underway.  I did find myself invited to a game of Settlers of Catan.  The owner brought out his First Edition of the US version of the game.  I know the game very well so I socialized with a few of my friends who where there until they had finished explaining the rules.  For those that don't know SoC, it is a resource management game where you roll dice and get resources, you spend resources to build towns and roads and ultimately cities in a race to be the first to 10 points.  There are cards that give special abilities that can be bought with resources.  There is also a Thief that is a mechanic players can use to block the resource gathering of other players.  And then finally players can Trade their resources with each other.

Getting Clay was very tough in this game.  After many rounds of very little progress I start to make some progress. I get some lucky breaks and get enough to build a city on the only Clay on a common number (8). I think I have this game locked down and should be winning with in a few turns.  Thats when the other players start ganging up to hold me back.  The Thief sat on my 8 blocking me from getting any Clay and dragging the game out.

The game is close and I have been at 9 points for the last 30 minutes.  I see one of the new players has caught up and he also has 9 points. I am thinking that it's going to be a repeat of the Blue Moon City game. Then the flood gates open and I get the cards I need to win, but it's not my turn.  I am convinced that a 7 will be rolled and I will loose everything.  Unbelievably no 7 is rolled and I have a stack of about 20+ cards in my hand.  Its 3x more than I need to let me build my final city and win the game.

I still love this game, but I have move on to play so many better games that I rarely have the urge to play SoC.  If I do its on the Xbox because I can play a game in about 20-30 minutes with the computer doing all the book keeping and set up...it just goes so much faster.  A one and half our game of SoC just doesn't make much sense to me anymore. 

Dragon Vally visits me...

I am good friends with indi-board game designer CW Karsens of Diamond K. Games.  He has some of his games up on The Game Crafter where you can buy them now.  Most recently he got his game Dragon Valley funded through Kickstarter and has been keeping me up to date with the latest news.


On Saturday, CW stopped by my house to show me the very first Print of his game Dragon Valley, fresh of the plane from China.  He took some time to hang out and talk about Dragon Valley with some of my friends from work who were there helping me test my game Taipan.

CW showing off the box of his game Dragon Valley.

We talked about Field Hospital, the first game of CW's that I played, it's a lot of fun.  Mystic Cauldron, a great connect 3/tic-tac-toe type game with very deep strategy.  Trifectus (never released to buy), a Rock, Paper, Scissors game of the rise of the Roman Empire.  But mostly we talked about Dragon Valley.  Sadly CW could not stay to test Taipan with us, but he has promised that we will get together some time soon to do some play testing.


From Board Game Geek:
"Times are dire here around Dragon Valley. We're fighting off waves of orc armies, goblin war machines and even the flying lizards themselves. For now the mountain pass remains secure but our scouts have reported large gatherings in the valley and we're expecting a full scale assault before the season's end. If that wasn't enough to worry about, our neighbors are also preparing for war and petitioning the king for his troops and supplies which are already spread thin. It seems you'll not only be fighting a war of steel, but one of words as well."

Dragon Valley is a great game that has elements of Tower Defense.

Game Play:
Players take turns dividing items such as knights and archers, building materials for blacksmith shops and towers, special powers and even attackers. The attackers consist of dragons, orcs and battering rams that emerge from mountain passes into each player's lands. After dividing, other players select the group of items they prefer and leave the remainder with the player who did the dividing. After that, players use special cards to interfere with each others plans. The last step each round is for players to setup defenses, destroy the attackers or laying siege on the orc strongholds scattered throughout Dragon Valley.