Spiel : Boardgames in the UK

This week, I had expected there to be six of us so was planning to split into two groups. However, when we learned Mark W was stuck on Ludlow station, we opted to try Friedemann Friese’s latest game - Power Grid: Factory Manager - a game which has nothing to do with Power Grid but is still a tense, economic optimisation game.

The game is played over five rounds and each round is identical: Firstly, you bid for turn order tiles, which also determine how much discount you receive on your purchases each round. Then each player selects which factory components will be available for purchase, with the cheapest of each component having to be selected for possible sale before the more juicy stuff. Each player then buys what they want or can afford and places them in their factory. You are trying to obtain components that increase your production and storage or decrease your manpower requirements, while keeping control on your energy costs. Each time you add / replace something in your factory, you adjust these four factors and then receive income based on the lower of your production / storage capacity, after paying your energy costs (the price of which increases during the game. Income in the final round is doubled and then whoever has the most money wins.

We all thought this was an excellent design although, with five players, more stuff comes into the market and the length of the game increases accordingly. It took us around 2.5 hours to play, which is a bit long particularly as there is a big chunk of downtime while others take their turns. Nige and I almost decided to play a game of Macao while we were waiting at one stage. In the first round of our game, only one storage tile came up so the first player (me) snapped it up and gained an early income advantage on the others, although I had to tie up more workers for the next round. Mechanisation seemed a good option as it releases more workers to buy stuff with so by the third round some of us had factories completely populated by robots. I think Nige and I were the only ones to take seasonal workers in one round but Nige soon saw the error of his ways as he didn’t actually employ them in the next round so had basically wasted 14 Elektros. The fourth round saw me last in player order but with nothing decent to buy. I needed storage but there was none so I had to have a frugal round, spending just a little on upgrading a couple of machines. However, it meant I needed to be first in player order for the final round and it cost me two workers to secure that. However, I could still afford it in my robot-run factory. Guy on the other hand had all bar one of his workers in the canteen, although he was ahead on the income scale the previous round, so we experienced the quickest Guy turn ever in the history of the club. He had placed his worker for turn order so could add nothing to the market and had nothing to buy. We knew the scores were going to be close but didn’t realise it ws that close as just 6 Elektros separated first and third. My “bad” penultimate turn, where I virtually spent nothing was just enough to give me the win - phew! As I said, very tense. Ratings were pretty good although Nige and I knocked it down a notch due to the game length. Interested to see how it plays with 3 or 4 players.

This week, I’d just got a copy of The World Cup Card Game 2010 which, unsurprisingly, is a card game version of the board game The World Cup Game, centred on the 2010 tournament. Designed by Shaun Derrick and published by Games for the World, it is simply a deck of cards and a two page rule sheet.

The game is split into two phases: The group stage involves the 32 teams in 8 groups playing in a round robin league format. Each team receives 7 or 8 cards and the team manager will choose between 1 and 4 of the cards to allocate to each of their three matches. The cards vary between goal cards (1-3 goals depending on the strength of the team); attack cards, a pair of which counts as a goal and a singleton giving a chance at a goal based on the draw of a further card; penalty cards which are similar to singleton attacks but with a greater chance of scoring; defence cards which cancel attack cards; and foul/offside cards which cancel goals or attacks. Games are quickly resolved but choosing how many cards to allocate can be tricky as you need to determine which games you need to winn or can afford to lose. Still, if you’ve drawn rubbish cards to start with, you aren’t going to create many scoring chances however hard you try to perm them.

Once all 24 matches have been resolved, the top 2 teams in each group progress to the second phase, the knockout stage. Game play is different here and more closely follows that of the board game. All the teams in a round are available for players to play cards against up to a maximum of four cards for each team. However, goal and attack cards can be covered by foul/offside/defence cards to negate their advantage. Once all cards have been played, each match is resolved and the winners move on to the next round. At this stage, players who no longer have a team left in the tournament cease taking part in the card play and are just left to cheer / heckle the remaining managers. Drawn games in the knockout are resolved by penalty shoot out, which means that England will inevitably lose by these means at some stage in the tournament. Eventually, the final is resolved and the winning team/manager is crowned champion.

TWCCG is a fun game to play and has some interesting tactics but is to a great extent dependent on the cards you draw. I found the group stages more interesting than the knockout as allocating cards between three games involved more planning and guessing what the other team managers would be doing; the knockout was in the main just an exercise of placing good cards on your team and bad cards on your direct opponent so really  came down to who had drawn the better cards. Still, the game is easy to play, gives lots of opportunity to cheer your own good fortune or laugh at others’ misfortune, and is one that is easily played anywhere as it is simply a deck of cards. You do, however, need to download the score sheet to keep track of the tournament. We all enjoyed our first game although it took us just a bit longer than the 75 minutes advertised on the box. However, this is another good addition to the collection and will definitely see more play as we get closer to the real tournament.

In our game, we slightly varied the initial allocation of teams: The rules say teams are dealt out at random but I decided to split the top eight seeds so that all six of us got at least one decent team. Thankfully, everyone got a team through the group stages, although I was down to my last team, Argentina, having only drawn five teams (rather than some others receiving six) and my others being the mighty North Korea, South Korea, Chile and Japan.

In the round of 16, we saw two penalty shoot-outs with Ivory Coast defeating Switzerland 4-3 and my own Argentina scraping through 7-6 against Mark G’s France. However, my luck came to an end in the Quarters and both Mark K and I were relegated to spectators for the rest of the game. England (Guy) lost in the semi-finals and inevitably lost to Uruguay (Mark G) on penalties in the third place play-off. The final ended up being a goal-fest with Cameroon (Nige) eventually overcoming The Netherlands (Steve) 6-4, although Nige’s top decking skills in the final had to be seen to be believed. Great fun.

There were only three of us this week so I decided to try Neuland, produced by eggert spiele and Z-Man games as it was reported to be best with three players. That’s probably true because a four player game would have ended up even more tedious than this session turned out. It’s not that the game was bad; it just seemed like too much work and very little fun. Someone hinted that the lack of fun made it the perfect game for ‘no-fun’ Nige (can’t remember who said it) but I think Nige would actually have hated it with a vengeance.

The game involves working down a production tree, using basic resources to produce something that is then used for something else which can then be used in combination with another resource to produce something else. Once you get far enough down the production tree, you get to produce something for victory points and once someone has claimed 12 VPs, they win. Unfortunately, there is little you can do between turns and although you try to set yourself up for your next turn, things can change and you need to work through your various actions from scratch. That said, there is quite a bit of planning you can do but there seems very little that can be put down to clever play. You pick a branch of the production tree to go down and then optimise your actions accordingly. And the branches are too long in my view. The game works but it is just too dry for me. The one aspect that I did quite like was the turn order track in that, like Thebes, the player furthest behind takes the next turn. Hence it is possible to engineer that you take two turns together or before your main rival.

In our game, it was pretty close between Mark K and me but once it became obvious that I was bound to win (this being after two and a half hours), we decided to stop with possibly another 10 or 15 minutes still to play. Basically, we found it too long overall, player turns were too long so plenty of downtime even with three players and no real spark to make it fun. One for the Ebay pile, I think.

This week’s session of the Shrewsbury Boardgames Club will be on Friday 20th March and will take place at Garry’s house.

Just a quick note to confirm that this week’s session of the Shrewsbury Boardgames Club will take place on Friday 6th March at Garry’s house.

This week’s session of the Shrewsbury Boardgames Club will take place on Friday 27th February at Garry’s house.

The next session of the Shrewsbury Boardgames Club will be held on Friday 20th February at John’s house. If Steve is coming, that means we’re expecting seven people this week.

I don’t know. One week away and it all falls apart. Fancy letting Kennett win everything - a barrel full of monkeys picking cards / tiles/ bids at random could probably have done better than the rest of you!

Anyway, this week’s session  on Friday 13th February 2009 will be held at Garry’s house - hopefully with some sensible results.

I’ve spoken to John and he has confirmed that he can host this week’s session of the Shrewsbury Boardgames Club on Friday 6th February 2009. He did, however, make a plea for one or two of you to bring some games. I definitely can’t make it this week as my one hour Canadian conference call is now a two hour call.

The next session of the Shrewsbury Boardgames Club will be held on Friday 23rd January 2009 at Garry’s house.