Mare Nostrum: I hardly knew thee

[This post has been edited. See the explanation here.]

MN on Mon Night

Monday night I brought Mare Nostrum. I knew getting it to the table would be an up-hill battle, but I set out with high hopes nevertheless.

After the appetizer of To Court the King, the group was deciding what to play next. Optimistically, I offered Mare Nostrum + expansion.

All-in-all, there was a lot of eye motion, fidgeting, and mumbling. Some rolled their eyes (in exasperation?); others averted their eyes (in embarrassment?); still others closed their eyes (but I think that guy was just sleeping...). Some one mumbled something about having played in the last year. Several others mumbled similar sentiments.

Some one raised the complaint that the last turn of the last game of MN took longer than 3 games of Race for the Galaxy. This statement is wild hyperbole, but it is true the last few turns took a long time.

Summarizing fidgeting, eye-motion, and accusations, Mare Nostrum was not played Monday evening.

MN in context

Extrapolating the furtiveness (to say nothing of direct challenges...), I do not see Mare Nostrum getting back to the table any time soon.

To be fair, I cannot blame anyone. A mighty river of games flows through the SABG, and any game showing the slightest flaw deserves to be quickly washed downstream to the math-trade delta. Why bother to play a game w/ any flaw when the world is saturated with untried games?

Our last game of MN took about ~4 hrs, and it had a...let me say "strange" ending. Speaking for myself, I enjoyed the last game quite a bit despite some issues. As Atlantis, I managed to build up my empire w/o being seriously attacked. There were land attacks, sea attacks, gods, trading, and more. MN provides some civ-like aspects, some military aspects, some diplomacy, some trading. There's some "attack the leader," but it's mitigated by the fact that a wonder/hero never goes away. To cap it all off, the different players have significantly different abilities. This kind of asymmetry is great when it is balanced, and MN seems to be reasonably well balanced.

While it took a while, it was also a learning game for almost everyone. I tried a variant to speed things up, but it was untested and caused a lot of confusion. People claim once the game is well known to the players it takes about 2-3 hours while still offering an epic, civ-like feeling.

While I enjoyed it a lot, it's true the game has some flaws. The ending can be strange, the trading mechanic is weird. I hear that a bad player can wreck the whole game, although in our one play that wasn't the case, IMO.

Woe is me

I enjoyed the game. A lot.

Those who didn't like the game have moved on to others.

Alas, it requires at least 4 players, and preferably 5-6. I doubt I will be able to muster this number ever again.

I suspect it will molder in my closet until I break down and consent to a trade.

Of such bitter moments is life built.

The King is dead; long live the King

Luckily, what the SABG taketh away, they also give. I doubt I can get this back to the table, but I know that many other games await me. Before Mon, I had never even heard of Fast Food, and it turned out to be a lot of fun.

Anyone want to play Combat Commander? I still want to try Thurn and Taxis. Then there's my (soon to be) painted BL set. Then there's the latest civ game out there: Through The Ages.

Summing up, I am left with but two parting words:

Game on!

You can never have this...6/2 report

8:30 am gaming can be rough but 4 of us (Al, Ben, Jeff and myself) managed to get to Jeff's house around then. Not knowing when Rob would appear, we broke out a quick game of Nexus Ops. It was my first time and I would describe the game as a lightish "war" game that probably fills the same type of itch that other "war" games like risk and air baron fill but in like 1/3 the time. In my opinion that is a huge improvement as there is only so much I can take so I might pick this up to play with my friends in the future. Some bad early fortune for me was repaid with some fortunate card draws and at least average luck with the dice down the stretch to pull out a blitzkrieg victory with 6 vps (out of 12) coming over the final two turns.

Rob still was not there but we knew from a conversation with him that he would soon be so Ben, Jeff and I tried a quick game of Coloretto. We degenerated to mostly a care-bear style of play and with some help from lucky draws I pulled out yet another win (don't worry my comeuppance was yet to come and with a vengeance).

Rob had finally shown up but we were all starving so a quick trek over to taco c for lunch was our next mission. Having satiated all hunger requirements we returned to Jeff's to try our hand at one of Rob's latest acquisitions, Notre Dame.

Notre Dame (at the moment at least) appears to be to me what I wished Fairy Tale was: a game involving the draft mechanic in it that is not completely and totally inscrutable...all dragon hide grrr.... There are many facets that you want to work on at once and the trick is trying to balance everything to some degree. Like many games with a draft mechanic there is a strong incentive to be doing something different than the people to your right (who are feeding you cards), but some balance must be maintained(at least thats what it felt like with our first two plays).

In the first game, Rob and Al fed me plenty of park actions with the net result that most of my late game victory point grabbing actions were coming with a +3 vp bonus. We also had a scare with rats threatening to overrun us all at some point with two consecutive really bad rat draws but I think that was an anomaly. In the end I ran away with that one since the victory point bonus let me achieve an enormous score.

Having now seen the power of the park combined with the power of being the only one in that strategy, we tried again. This time parks were not as easy to come by and in fact I only ended up with 3 guys total in there (with My Buddy(TM) staying for a short time to boost it to 4 temporarily before heading to greener pastures). Jeff pursued a degenerate strategy of ignoring the rats completely and trying to tech up his victory point generator as soon as possible and it looked like it would win but some fortunate events regarding Notre Dame let me hold onto a second tighter victory (comeuppance coming, please don't worry). Having played it twice, I can safely say that with the insane amounts of interaction going on in the game, Simon will love this game (In case you didn't know I was being sarcastic).

Finally, it was time for my comeuppance. We played Citadels. Or rather I should say, Rob, Jeff, Ben and Al played Citadels. I pretended to play, but thanks to a rather amazing run with assassinations against me, ended up sitting in my cage with the 4 of them flaunting their turns at me "you can never have this, la la la la" they would say. It actually got amusing at some point, "who is assassinating me this turn?(an appropriate question always)"..."if you are trying to steal from Jeff you should clearly not steal from the King since Ben obviously has it since that is worst for me(unassailable logic). " Alas, I never got out of my cage and Rob ran away with it.

Comeuppance in hand, it was time to leave.

Saturday Recap

Lets see. Games played:

Mississippi Queen:planning to be the mad rammer, while fun in theory, sucks in practice. Jeff won a disputed (not by me) victory. Of all the race games (I am not a fan of the genre) I find Ave Caesar to be the most acceptable for some reason.

Citadels: Creative shuffling of the roles by Jon allowed him to run away with it.

Coloretto: Jon's masterful take every color every time strategy ran away with it again (guys where's the metagaming? hello?)

Traders of Genoa: Amy ran away with it cashing in like 20 mega deliveries (I might be forgetting key details like what they are called and the exact number but it was totally ridiculous). I had a great (allegedly) first day, but it was downhill from there. I was actually closer than I originally thought since I forgot to add in vps for my buildings until about 11pm tonight (midway through a game of big boggle at the "other" gaming group).

Dragons' Gold: Not a fan of it at all. The treasure resolution mechanic is just terrible. There I said it (I may have said it earlier, don't remember). The magic items were almost universally lame except for one which was very good in our group. Two boournses down on that game.

The Rum and Pirates game: I verified that I cannot hold my alcohol, but more importantly discovered that Amy can hold hers slightly worse than me. Yay random luck, although I will claim that was payback for getting stung by approximately 6.02x10^23 scorpions.

Quick(read 1 hour) drive from Jeff and Amy's house to the "other" gaming group about 4 miles away (that type of traffic on a saturday wtf mate????)

Some game called traxx?: I think this had to be by the same people that made Hive. Bakelite Hex tiles in a murse of some sort. I should have been more attentive to how full the bag was because I managed to set up a potentially and probably closeable big loop, but delayed closing it to try to interfere with the other players loops, and then all of a sudden without warning the bag was empty and I was dead.

High Society: I tried to introduce heavier fare, but was firmly rebuffed. I lost the first game when a card I had to have came up and I just didn't have the right change to bid a reasonable amount for it (I had my 25 , 4 ,3 ,2 ,1 and any bid up to 22 would have won the game for me). In practice I bid my 25 and hoped for the best and the best was boourns. Played like 4 games of this and that was the closest I came to winning. Boournsed yet again.

Big Boggle: I ran away with it thanks to a few good rounds. We played some rules differently than I am used to (we were allowed to use 4 letter words and allowed to use plurals as well, both of which seem to be moderately ridiculous since the lists were forever long)

Saw Ben's favorite Cranium being played and Cranium Hoopla being played. Also saw Alhambra and Mah Jongg being played. Someone brought Vegas Showdown and TTR (unplayed) and Princes of Florence, Modern Art, and Puerto Rico (my contributions other than High Society) also found themselves being surprisingly unloved. No celebrities, since ashamed of my lackluster kit, I shipped off the key parts to my sister a few weeks back so she could entertain guests.

The other group isn't quite the Monopoly-fest that Ben claimed though just to get some non mis-information out there. I was impressed that Vegas Showdown made an appearance even if nobody technically played it per se.

Also, no pictures for you, I was up at some ungodly time yesterday morning and it is time to sleep (possibly after replying to Brians recap).