Friday Recap
Jon, Michael, Jacqui and I gamed Friday Night. We started off with a couple games of Factory Fun. This is actually a simple little game, in terms of rules, but it's tough to build an efficient factory. Especially when claiming the factories is done by speed. Whoever touches it first gets it.
So, a traditional turn is -- "On the count of three, flip. 1 - 2 - 3."
Someone madly grabs a factory, then says "Uh-oh." Honestly, the picture to the right shows a supposedly winning score, but where are the crossover pipes? The T-junctions?
Anyway, after that we broke out some SimplyFun party games. There was In10sity, the trivia game where all answers are 1-10. Eh. Eye to Eye is better, but that's basically a remake of "What were you thinking" with a simpler scoring mechanism.
After that we trotted out Glory to Rome. I've now seen a fair number of victory conditions, and combinations, as well as all four "end the game" conditions. I'm not quite ready to bump my rating up beyond a seven, but I've played this a dozen times in the last six weeks, so it may happen. Jacqui won the first game with a Forum victory (get one of each client) despite Michael's coliseum (which let him kill several of her clients). She got the final two via a Bar, which lets you recruit clients from hand (instead of from the pool).
The second game looked like a runaway building victory for either Michael or Jon. Jon had the building that finished anything with a single good during the architect, and the foundations were depleted quickly. Michael, on the other hand, got an early craftsman client and built the thinker (which let him refill his hand after a craftsman) and a sewer (which let him discard his hand before refilling, if he desired). He quickly cycled his hand, and his deck. Jacqui again got the forum out. I built a fast Pallisades, to make me immune to legionaries, but then stalled. I eventually got a market stand(?), which brought my influence to four but let me have a six card vault. Neither Jon or Michael could end it (or choose not to), and in the final 3-4 rounds I filled my vault, which gave me two points in buildings, two points of standard influence, and twenty two points of graft (in my vault). This was several points more than the builders had, and enough to win.
Then we closed up with Smarty Party, which infuriated as usual.
Labels: session report
posted by Brian @ 6:39 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
That sports question on Smarty Party was actually a great question and upon further review, the answers stand as given on the card. I was right that you had to go back forever to hit Rudy T., but while you are going back forever, it is only Jackson and Pops so whoops. When I gave the question to my friend today he went about things the right way by saying what the state of the answers were in march 2007 and then working backwards until he hit the desired year(s) from there. Obviously neither of us knew the first thing about the hockey portion (especially since hockey teams change coaches almost constantly).
Glory to Rome is pretty fun. It isn't one I'm going to say no to in the near future.
In10sity on the other hand I'll say it now and forever....no.
The other party game was ok, but I can think of at least 10 party games that I like better with little to no thought.
Speed is not my forte so it isn't shocking that I'm struggling with the fun times at the factory. But its at least moderately interesting for me although I have negative idea how to plan ahead in that game.
I wasn't particularly mad at the sports question ... after all, it stated the premises quite clearly (and you could get the answers from dozens of sources and they would all agree. Most SP questions are open to interpretataion. That's infuriating.
I seem to recall at least one factually based sports question that still suffered from "that we like" syndrome. That one was very distinctive from a typical smarty party question in that they actually defined the time period precisely so there was no speculating about if say the Heat had won by the time they wrote the questions or whatever.
I was thinkning about SP after the game last monday, and realized (or decided, or convinced myself, or something) that they write the answers lists ambiguously on purpose. If they pick the nine most obvious European countries that start with the letters G,H,K, and Z, then we'd rattle them off, the reader and the person who named the last one (and thus held the pants) would each back up one. "Mistakes" would be much rarer and the game would drag on forever. Writing the lists in the "that we like" style encourages mistakes. It's random and frustrating, but I think it's actually part of the design rather than the fact that the writers are morons. The alternative would be to write lists for difficult categories (Name the twelve Prime ministers of Uganda) which would make it unattractive to the casual gamer market.
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