Session Report 4/17: Double-You Tee Eff?

I arrived around 15 minutes late to witness the tail end of a San Juan game, won by Michael by around 40,000 points. As the game was cleared, I heard the grumble, "At least it's shorter than Puerto Rico." This cheered my heart, as that's never been my favorite game either (I think there's an illusion of control; I once chose roles at random and lost by two).

Next up was Ra, which quickly budded into two games, with mine also occupied by Patrick, Ted, and Jeff (yes, I'm finally learning names so I'm showing off). Patrick expressed great enthusiasm for the game, but by the end of the rules explanation we learned that he had been playing a completely different game, which I shall call "Rhaa", and which might be fun to try sometime. In epoch one I sacrificed my future for four monuments, three pharoahs, two gold, and a god tile in a pear tree, for 13 points. Fortunately no one had a good second turn except for Patrick, who jumped from last to first in pharoahs. Patrick kicked into overdrive in epoch three, scoring in every category including highest suns. But I was left with the last sun tile with five Ras left to draw, and got enough monuments for a 42-38 win. Good times.

Now it was time for the ultraviolence portion of the evening, starting with 8-player "Bang!". After taking one turn, I had a "Final Destination"-style vision as soon as Simon's dynamite hit the table. Sure enough, it had my name on it, and Regenado Uno was out in record time. The next dynamite turned into the turn order marker for 45+ minutes, as Ted, Patrick, and Packrat Jeff whittled away the competition one by one. Still good, but definitely better with High Noon. I'm not sure how I feel about the green cards yet, either; not sure they added anything.

At this point I eschewed my own copy of Fury of Dracula to try something new: Duel of Ages, a game full of design decisions that I would label...curious. To wit:

- Oddly for a game with "Duel" in the title, there's practically no fighting for the first hour, as nobody but Spartacus could fight effectively without equipment. In fact, 80% of the victory points (and thus the game) revolve not around fighting each other, but rolling dice against a card.
- Rather than being pulled to the center where they can mix it up, the characters are constantly pulled to the edge of the map by the labyrinths.
- Since characters get a bonus in the labyrinth that matches their time period, the characters naturally segregate themselves, and the "Genghis Khan versus the Martians" matchups that seem to be the game's main draw rarely come about.
- A few of the characters evoked some personality (again, Spartacus), but most of them felt very flat. There was absolutely nothing to distinguish my Future Guy (his special ability was "+1 in every labyrinth"...yawn). And two of my other characters had special abilities that relied on very specific equipment, which I didn't even see until the last 15 minutes of the game. Otherwise, they are all just a list of very average abilities.
- There's almost no planning possible in attacking the adventures. If one is face-up (and they rarely are), it's almost certain to be gone by the time you get there, and even if it's not, assigning the right character will only gain you a few percentage points, as nearly every ability on every character was yellow, green, or blue (or rarely more significant than just sending the character from the right time period).

Surprisingly, the game felt almost identical in mechanics to "Candamir: The First Settlers", except that the latter game has much nicer components, more control, and (sadly) fewer satchel charges. We called the game with Ted having a small but growing lead, when he was having trouble managing an entire team of characters. I found that by getting all of my guys killed, I was having no such trouble.

With Admiral Dracula setting out to sea for the 8th time, the Fury of Dracula game was called as well, and the six remaining hardy souls gathered 'round for some Richochet Robots. I apologize for becoming insufferable (or, more insufferable than usual) at this point, but this game makes me hyper. I'm used to playing with RR savant and fellow BGGer Mike Mayer, who could slaughter us all with his left brain while humming the "Meow Mix" tune with his right, so I'm accustomed to setting the engine on Ludicrous Speed when playing this game. We played with a catch-the-leader rule that gave the point to the solver with the fewest points scored. The problem was that this was a particularly good group -- on only two out of 17 rounds was the optimal path found by only a single player. So we were pretty much guaranteed to have an N-player tie, where N was everybody but Michael.

Next week is the last week of classes for me, so I'm hoping to be more available for non-Monday gaming. I should also have probably mentioned this some time ago...



Homemade, baby. 8'x4' of casino-ish goodness. Anyone up for a game?