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Gareth Madeley
United Kingdom
Wirral
Merseyside
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On Monday, I had a chance to play three new games, normally that means I'm going to lose all three, however something happened, I won one, hooray! But what were they?
The first game we played was Poo: The Card Game, a ... ahem ... "quick" take that card game. The problem is that you have to eliminate everyone and the first two eliminations are brought back at half "health", great. As you can clean yourself instead of throwing poo (depending on card draws) you then regain "health". A long game and it was boring. Poo - at least it's honest.
After this, we had eight people (some had arrived) and so we broke up into two fours as no one had an eight player (are there any good games for eight, anyway?). Simon had come back from Essen with piles of games one of which he hadn't played, but had brought, so we had a go at Troyes, an interesting euro-game that uses dice. Throughout the game, you can use your dice for a variety of actions, however, you can, if you need them, buy your opponents dice. This game clicked for me early on and I used the Diplomat almost every turn to hit the event cards that were arriving. The final scoring is reminiscent of Automobile's demand tiles as you only know a share of the demand or, in this case, the final scoring conditions.
Finally, we pulled out Glen More, a game similar to Carcassonne but in Scotland. The aim is to score the most points by accruing Members of Parliament (by sending your chieftains off), Special cards (by buying touristy locations) and whiskey barrels (distilling grain, or as you'll call it, yellow). This game, unlike Troyes, just didn't click for me, well, not until about halfway through the second round when I knew I would come last. Sadface. I didn't enjoy the game, however I liked two mechanics behind it, the supply/demand track is a good idea for a lighter economic-y game and the fact that your score for each item was compared to the lowest rather than just a straight you get X points for Y items. I'm not a fan of Carcassonne, so it may have been that which put me off it.
So, random thought this week?
Dice. This week, we played Troyes and I own Macao, and it seems more and more that euro-games are using dice. It seems that the Council of Eurogame Designers met the Society of Ameritrash Designers and said: "You're going to borrow our mechanics, so we're going to borrow your polyhedral random number generators."
Last week, I mentioned that I'd played Outpost, someone came in and said that it dice, so it must be a game "of pure chance". So how are dice rolls balanced, there are several ways around it. One way is to have a massive number of dice being thrown throughout the game, overall, regardless of who rolls, the dice should balance out over the game.
Another way would be to (like Macao) have a communal roll that everyone uses, this means that everyone will have the same roll affecting them and their strategy, Troyes instead has each player rolling their own dice, but you can buy other players if you roll poorly, and if you roll well, yours will probably be bought.
So, dice can be insanely random, but in a well-designed game, the randomness from that will be mitigated by how they're used or by letting you balance out the risk through modifiers.
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