Just wrapped up after my annual long gaming weekend. House is passable, guests headed to the airport, and I thought I might post a few thoughts here.
The core experience for the weekend is Advanced Civilization, Bruce Harper’s classic published by Avalon Hill. We were able to put together 6 players for day, and played a full game. We had one rookie (an experienced gamer though, we are not cruel), the rest of us have about a dozen games under our belts. Italy, Thrace, Crete, Asia, Babylon, and Egypt were in play. I’m pleased to say I guided Asia to victory by about 130 points (finishing with a score of 4348), which is odd for our group, as the last four games have had margins of victory of less than 20 points (out of similar 4000+ point scores). Yes, they have been that tight, and if there are Civ grogs here, I’d love to hear what they see for victory margins. I rode a lot of luck - I drew relatively few calamities, so even when I received them in trade, I’d had trading stock to begin with. No civil wars for me.
If you haven’t played, Advanced Civ has a theme of growing a civilization from the late stone age through the iron age. Populations expand, cities are raised, trade goods arrive and are traded, technologies are purchased. The strongest mechanic supports the trading of trade goods - matched goods are geometrically more valuable, so players have a huge incentive to trade. Trade rules prevent trading single cards, and require incomplete information in the exchange. There are also calamities among the trade cards, which are themselves tradeable. Receive a Piracy in place of the gold or ivory you’re expecting, and you’ll be laid low by pirates. Unless, that is, you can pass it off to an unwitting trade partner. Trading is loud and fast, requires awareness of who’s buying and selling, demands careful attention to whether you can assemble the set you think you can, and a nice appreciation for when you should just man up and accept the Epidemic that you know the grinning Thracian is going to stick you with.
Advanced Civ goes some way to avoiding the “Eternal China” problem by willingly decimating the players’ creations. The calamities at the core of the game can be devastating, especially in combination. While teaching the rookie, I’d advised him not to become too attached to any city or population, he’d be likely to lose it. He nodded, and thought it’d be like losing a city or two to Montezuma in the Sid Meirs spin on the civ theme. He was disabused when one turn laid waste to six of his eight cities and dropped his population from 30 to 12. The mechanics let you rebuild easily, but you do capture a real sense of dark ages in the game, when everything goes wrong for everyone. There’s only light rubberbanding in the rules, but the players can easily pull back a frontrunner with a trade emabargo. Good luck and a few savvy trades had put me up by 300 points at one time - a single turn’s embargo by the other players set me back to second place. I do wonder what happens when single session players meet - could they rolling embargo the leaders to poison the entire game?
Civ is my favorite boardgame. If you have a chance (and the 12 or so hours it takes to get a full game in), I can’t recommend it enough. OK, that should be qualified - traders, strategy gamers, and civ builder types will love it. Wargamers might like it (but don’t play it as a wargame) - there are counters to push and territory to control. Role players (Arkham Horror folks) maybe not so much. If you like Battlestar, I think you’ll like this game - betrayal isn’t a one-off mechanic, sort of a rolling constant over the course of the whole thing.
Speaking of Battlestar, we played that as well. Five players, and I hold that it’s better to be lucky than good. I played Baltar, was human out of the gate, and toaster after the turn. I played so poorly that even in the table talk postagame, the other players wouldn’t believe I’d been human at the start. Normally I enjoy the game, but we were slow playing (two players had only played once before), and my own poor play (and subsequent dumb luck) made for a considerable anticlimax.
Axis&Allies was a part of the weekend as well. My brother’s a part of the group, we’d played against each other since the first Christmas that the first edition was released (83?84?). The others have been tangling for more than 25 years, so it’s freighted with a lot more drama than it might otherwise have. We’re playing the newer edition (not the Anniversary one tho), and as UK I came out on the winning Allied side. In classic ameritrash fashion luck played a significant role, and I’ve no problem with that. I just need to figure out how to get “OK, Soviets, 17 at 2 <thunder of dice hitting box lid>” as a ringtone.
A pile of Dominion, Caracassone, Modern Art, and Settler’s of Catan as filler, but one more new one - Space Alert. A timed, cooperative game, and a brutal one at that. The training wheels scenario that I thought we’d stroll through happily handed us our hat, our ass, and our collective dignity. If you like the cooperation inherent in Pandemic, but are frustrated either by the marionette play, or the grinding exploration for the optimal path, consider Space Alert. We got a few more scenarios in - winning one, getting hammered in the others (and we’re still bumper bowling at this point, we haven’t seen all the complexity nor done anything to up the challenge). I think I like it, I’m not sure if I love it. We get loud, and yell a lot at each other, which is really exciting, but I’m afraid it might be pitched to difficultly to really make getting to success a joy, especially if we don’t play but a couple of times a year. I am eager to spend more time with it, on balance.
