Council and Contracts: We build this city...

I can't remember where I read about Councils and Contracts but I do love a good city building game and other than Suburbia and The Capitals, I have not yet found another good city game. I managed to get a review copy from the publisher and brought it out for a few games with my new school mates.

Councils and Contracts is a game published by  Mücke Spiele in 2013 and is the first game by designer Kalle Malmioja. In it, players vie for the resources from the different councils so that they can get and construct buildings which will give them points and additional actions. When the game ends, there will be some final scorings and whoever has the most points will win the game.

Week of gaming from 14 Sept to 19 Sept: Lucca and Impulse

Our school organises Play test nights every thursday. This is the night where we can get our games/prototypes play tested and get some valuable feedback. This is also a time where we can try our fellow students' works and meet designers not from our school. Mostly we are using it to test our game design assignments and I will usually follow it up with a boardgame or two. Good thing about lockers, I can shift some of my boardgames over to the school and have a ready supply PLUS free up space at home ;p

Imperial Settlers - Solo Play & Second Impressions

Well, I mentioned in my initial impressions post for Imperial Settlers that I would be having a second crack at the game over the weekend, and I did! Not only did I managed to get my second game in, I also managed to get in 2 solo plays on a very dull Sunday night. I'll start with the very short 2nd impressions and then on to the solo impressions.

For my second play, I headed the Roman Empire instead and seeing it was a 3 player game, I purposely left out the Japanese faction. To get the scores out of the way, the end points were 57/55/47. I came in second to the barbarian faction (2 wins out of 2). The Egyptians were dead last again (2 last out of 2). Am I implying anything? No. Just info for those who would like to know. 

Anyway, I much rather enjoyed my second play of the game. Not because I was actually competitive this time round, but this time I got to see some synergies in the game as I actually managed to get some decent production buildings from the get go. This really helped to provide resources that allowed me to manage a somewhat decent engine and to let me actually plan what I wanted to do instead of just doing what I could do with what I had (or didn't have - which is what my first game felt like). 

Push Your Luck Podcast Episode #44 : First Transatlantic Episode!

Eric is now in New York and Jon STILL is in Singapore! This is their first episode where they are SO FARRRRR Apart.

Eric and Jon do apologise for the long delay in releasing this episode because Eric had to get settled down and start school. Hopefully the schedules will become regular again. In this episode, Eric and Jon talk about 3 games each that they had played recently. Eric talks about Subdivision, Quantum and Nika while Jon talks about Imperial Settlers, Run Fight or Die and Too Many Cinderellas.

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Initial Impressions - Imperial Settlers

Over the past weekend, I managed to get 2 Gen Con releases played - Imperial Settlers & Run, Fight, or Die. Both were rather hot releases I would say. Well, at least the hype for them were relatively high throughout the Con. I only managed to get 1 play in for each as we had other games we wanted to play as well. So this is really just a very brief look at the first of the two and me telling you my early thoughts from my playthrough.

The one I was more excited to get to the table was Imperial Settlers. It's the newest game by Ignacy Trzewiczek and Portal Games.
Imperial Settlers is a civilization and engine building game. There are 4 factions out of the box and each faction has its own unique deck of cards and play style. The game plays over 5 rounds, after which, the player with the most victory points is the winner of the game.
Each round is played as such,
1) Lookout Phase - Acquire 3 new cards
2) Production Phase - Produce your faction's fixed resources + resources from your buildings
3) Action Phase - Play cards / Activate Cards / Execute Actions
4) Cleanup Phase - Discard all unused resources

29 August : A little bit of mingling, playing and lotsa cake...

Woot! The last day of welcome week for us and it was a gathering of the entire school of Game Center and where we introduced ourselves briefly and then mingled and even got to play some games! I am pretty sure I am one of the oldest ones in my cohort but luckily someone nicely mentioned that I did not look old and even looked 26! :P Well it pays to be always young at heart AND mingling with younger people lol... 

It was quite interesting seeing how different our backgrounds are. We have english majors who have never coded before and we have people who are very well versed in the various game development engines and have done a lot. It will be pretty exciting to see what our collaborations will produce. I also got to play 2 games which had been produced by our seniors.

First up is Guts of Glory which was kickstarted in 2012 and I believe, self published. Guts of Glory is a 2-4 player game where players are creatures trying to stuff their mouths with items, chew and swallow them for Glory points. First player to reach 7 will win the game. There are 2 types of cards, Condiments which usually do not provide any glory cards but give special actions, and Food items which usually comes with glory points. Both cards will also have a chew factor which indicates how many chew tokens needs to be placed on them before they can be swallowed and their effects/points activated/scored. During your turn, you have to take a card from the 3 face up cards that are on the "plate" and then place it into your mouth which is your player board. Your mouth can hold 3 condiments and 2 food cards. Then you are to take 2 chew tokens and place them onto the cards in your mouth. If any of them are "chewed" then you activate the action or score the points.

very interesting art but the score track weirdly reminds me of the behind..

The artwork is quite interesting as it has a very artsy somewhat whimsical feel to it. I commented that the score track looks somewhat like an exploding anus but it seems I was the first to think that way. Go figure ;p Gameplay wise it was pretty straight forward to play. The interaction between players seems to come in when you activate cards to steal their food OR forcefully feed them cards. IF they cannot keep the card in their mouths, then they will trigger a SPEW effect which will add +1 glory to the card being spewed and they pass it to the next player. If you can create a chain effect, then you can potentially score up to 3 points with 1 SPEW.

I did not finish a full game though because the other players were drawn to play One Night Ultimate Werewolf with the Chair of my school. Still this game is in our Game Center Library so I will definitely get a chance to finish up a game and post my thoughts about it. Perhaps I can even make a review video if I get the chance.

Next up is Nika which was also recently kickstarted and published by Eagle games. It is a 2-4 player abstract style game that plays from 30 minutes to an hour. It is a team play game so players sitting opposite each other will be part of the same team. The objective is to try to get one of your pieces into your team member's camp. To do that, players have to "walk" or move their pieces from their own camps pass an enemy's camp into your team member's camp.

here we go! Very nice art and board...

During your turn, you have up to 2 actions. Essentially you can do 3 things. You can move a piece OR a Phalanx, rotate a piece or a Phalanx and return a routed piece to your camp. Each player will have 6 discs with an arrow on them. The direction the arrow points will be the direction that army unit is facing. This is important because where you are NOT facing, that unit will be vulnerable to being routed by your opponents' pieces. To route a piece, all you need to do is move your piece into an opponent's piece that is not facing you at that time.

so much routed pieces I have!

To move a piece, you just need to move them along the squares that make up the paths on the board. The direction they will end up facing depends on how they moved. You can also not move and just rotate a piece. This is usually done to protect or threaten to engage an opponent's piece. The interesting part of the game lies in moving as a Phalanx.

Sparta is holding off my phalanx!

A Phalanx is formed when your pieces are adjacent to each other AND facing the same direction. Then you can move that entire group as a Phalanx OR rotate it. The reason for forming Phalanxes is that you will be using less actions to move many pieces. In addition, you can force enemy pieces to retreat because you have more pieces in your phalanx.

door is open for my partner to come in and for us to win!

The art is very clean and minimalistic and had good comments from those watching us play. It is a very abstract game in that thematically, the ability to have Phalanxes is the only thing tying this greek historical boardgame together. That being said, there is quite a clever game here. As a 4 player game, we had to somewhat decide on a path and tactically shift our pieces to both threaten our opponents and allow us to shift a piece to win. Halfway through the game, we thought we were in a bad position mainly because I had so many pieces routed and my side of the board was largely empty. My team mate had one of his side being held off by the opponent to his right. In the end, we both focused on our opponent to my right and manage to route his units enough to let one of my team mate's piece slip through. They did try to stop us but the interesting thing about routed pieces is, is that it allows them to start from your base and thus form a sort of protective corridor for your team mate's piece. I must say though that this game will be quite prone to Analysis Paralysis. Its quite a tactical game because while you may have a strategic plan, a lot of things may have happened before it comes back to your turn again. I guess after several plays you can get a game in under 30 minutes but the way we played it certainly did not seem that way. Take note that this is my first play so I cannot really give a good review of it yet but it was tense for a while as I was wracking my brain thinking of what I can do to help our cause. There are many opportunities for us to stall the game though and many chances for stalemates so that maybe a problem. If you have a chance, do give it a go and let me know what you think!

Oh one thing to note, I previously mentioned how One Night Ultimate Werewolf wasn't the game for me and my group. Well the students played several rounds of this and I realised 2 very important points. One, that yes it DOES require the RIGHT group to fully immerse themselves into the game and bring out the beauty of the game. Second, it is an amazing game to spectate. Similar to Esports and Poker, just watching the players play, lie, scheme is entertaining enough and allows the audience to be somewhat involved in the game! Especially when we saw how one player managed to confuse 3 others and cajole them into voting someone else out as he was the werewolf is like watching an exciting action packed movie. Better than a movie though because you cannot tell what the ending is until the voting.

So as some of you know, I just celebrated my 38th birthday last friday! :D I had a nice ramen meal with Wifey before heading to my school for the intro and welcome reception where everyone sang a birthday song for me and another student. When I got home I had a nice cake waiting for me baked by my Wifey.

birthday ramen! :P

At 38, embarking on a new chapter of my life, knowing I will be 40 when I graduate, can be a very daunting and scary prospect. But really, if there's something worth pursuing and something you are passionate about, why wait until you are way too old and too entrenched in your comfort zone before regretting? I am glad for this wonderful opportunity to be one of two Singaporeans to be selected to be in this program and am excited to see what I will create out of my two years here in the Game Center. It will be a lot of hard work, I will need to restart my somewhat rusty engine again to read, study and program but I am pretty sure there will be amazing outcomes from it. 

Wish me luck!

23 August : Lots of building going around...

Yay! I have finally moved to New York City and have mostly recovered from the jet lag. My iMac and Huskie also survived the trip and when a Singaporean friend currently working in NYC wanted to get together, we played some boardgames!

First up is Subdivision, a review copy from Bezier games. [Thanks Bezier games!]. I read through the rules and played a few Solo games to get a grasp of it so I was very excited to give this a go with 3 players. Rules explanation was kinda easy to go through but it definitely pays to run through one or two rounds so that all players get a good grip of it before playing it seriously.

Subdivision - 3 player. Surprisingly better than expected

It feels like a lot of games where you are handed some cards (in this case, tiles) and then choose the best one at that moment in time. In Subdivision's case, you react to the results of the die roll. You can pay $2 to ignore the die roll and place it anywhere. The main difference between this and subdivision is that the tile you place does not get activated. Its the tiles adjacent to the tile you just place that gets activated. The next difference is what you get when the tiles are activated. These benefits is what will determine your strategies and also where to place the tiles. Of course you maybe restricted by the tiles you get (as these are passed around), but ultimately there is enough flexibility that you won't feel too screwed.
After our game, we talked a little about it and we agreed that it was surprisingly more fun than what was expected (after rules explanation). I was quite worried about the randomness (from the die roll and tiles you get) making the whole game seems very ameritrashy but I am happy to report that it doesn't feel that bad. The whole feel does remind you of suburbia but by itself is actually a different game. I will play a few more games with Wifey before doing a video review! Watch out for it!

Next up 2 games of The Builders. Not much to add on this except the 2nd game, my friend managed to amass SO MUCH money that when she ended the game she was at 21 points (4 more from money). Wife and me could not catch up though wife was closer to 17 than I was.

1st game managed to win. 2nd game lost and winner had 21 points

I still think there is more to this game than I have seen so far. Perhaps its time for me to try other strategies to "test the mechanisms" of the game. I know that not having tools can be tougher when playing the game. Also getting the right workers at the beginning can be VERy advantageous. Wife and friend commented they felt like they were running sweat shops especially when all the workers are men. LOL :)

Final game is Russian Railroads! I am so glad I got a chance to teach my wife the game and see if she will like it. One very important point that my wife brought up to me afterwards was that the way I taught the game was too fast and not that friendly. I have to remember that I have to be more descriptive and patient when teaching. Sometimes I tend to forget that they are not part of the usual gaming group that I had back in Singapore so I go through the rules really fast without much context or theme.

Glad I managed to teach this to the wife! 

Wife really liked the game though so much so we played on Yucata afterwards in a 2 player game. Here's hoping for more games of this before the year ends :) One GREAT benefit of playing on Yucata is that it calculates the end of round scoring and even gives you a preview of how many points you will get from your moves. That is very helpful when calculating and for the mathematically challenged and helps you to find the most optimal move each turn. If you want to play against me, invite me "duckizz" to a game!

By now you may have figured out that I am in NEW YORK! Its been a smooth transition over even though we were quite worried about Comet since his flight was delayed and other than the transit at Frankfurt, he was pretty much stuck in the crate for almost 30 hours! But I think he is acclimatising well now and luckily has not peed everywhere in the apartment so his training is still holding strong.

So far I haven't met any other of my classmates (except my fellow Singaporean) so it will be exciting when orientation starts next week! I am SOOOO looking forward to it and I will blog about my experiences (if this sort of thing interests you!)

Our first walk!