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Fri 13/2/09 BGC Meetup at OTK Cheras Part 2 - 18TN

jack208 — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 08:27:00 GMT

Gamers: Phuah (phuah), Lim (lim), Alvin (keealvin), Allen (blownfreaks), Yee Ling (crabzai), Heng (ayheng) and Jeff Au (jack208)

Games: Galaxy Trucker, Bang!, Santiago, 18TN and Agricola

Location: Old Town Kopitiam Cheras (Boardgamecafe.net) Location Map (wikimapia)
Date/Time: 13 February '09 (Fri) 8.00 PM - 5.30 AM

KL BOARDGAMES (FRIDAY 13TH) MEETUP REPORT @ OLD TOWN KOPITIAM CHERAS 13/2/09 PART 2
by jack208

FRIDAY THE 13TH MEETUP - R2

In the first part of my report, we played Galaxy Trucker, Bang! and Santiago. keealvin, blownfreaks and crabzai have to take their leave and there were four of us remaining. It's just 12.30 am and we reckon we could do two games before we call it a night.

The choice for the 1st game was between 18TN, Brass and Agricola. Since Phuah has only played a few 18xx games and Lim is new to the 18xx series, everyone agreed it would be good to do my new 18TN game that's based in Tennessee & Kentucky.

18TN Tennessee & Kentucky

18TN is the latest 18xx games to be added to my collection (Nov 08). I still have two other (bigger) 18xx games - 1832 and 1841v2 - that have not been played yet. However my choice for 18TN is part of my quest for a good beginner game to get more ppl into the 18xx genre.

IMHO 18AL and 18GA are two of the best intro 18xx games around. They've simple (small) maps, clean rules and can be played within 3 hours. 18AL would be better for 18xx newbies as it can be completed within 3 hrs while 18GA offers heavier gameplay at the expense of slightly longer play-time.

Both games are designed by Mark Derrick but sadly they are not produced as game sets to be sold off-the-shelf. Instead they are available either as i) free print-n-play download for your own DIY, or ii) partially assembled kit produced by John Galt that you can buy.

I did try 18Scan but find that it has too many non-standard rules - including Minors - and detract from my objective of looking for a standard 1830 intro game with cleaner rules. 18Scan is still a very good game (that plays in 2-3 hrs) and it's the perfect game to intro you to the heavier 18EU.

18TN is also a Mark Derrick creation and bears similarity to his 18AL & 18GA. With the exception of the Civil War rules, 18TN plays almost as a standard 1830 game with basic rules.

I should clarify what I meant by basic (or clean) rules. By these I meant the game plays with the standard 18xx ruleset (and most 18xx games are notorious for introducing some slight rule variances) without too much chrome, yes the vanilla flavor for eg.

Major Companies float on 60% shares sold, with 100% capitalization
Buying & selling of shares during Stock Round - can buy/sell in the same turn, once sold cannot buy back etc
Standard trains from 2-train to 8-train (without any of those 4D or 5E type of trains)
No bank loans or mergers or Government corporation coming out in later part of the game (though this is one feature I luv most about 1856)
Dividends for shares in the Open Market pays to the company, in the IPO pays to Bank.

Without much ado, let's dive into the 18TN gameplay and see how good it really is....

phuah and lim starting to get familiar with the 18TN map

Out of the four gamers who were doing this first-play of 18TN at OTK; two are seasoned 18xxers - ayheng and jack208 - while phuah has a couple of 18xx games under his belt and lim was a total newbie to 18xx. This mix of gamers experience with 18xx would be a good gauge of how 18TN plays among the new and the seasoned.

ayheng did the rules explanation for standard 18xx to phuah and lim while I scan thru the 18TN rulebook to determine if there are any rule variances or chrome. There was only one - Civil War - which is triggered when the fourth (and last) 3-train is bought. During the Civil War (which lasts one OR), each company will choose to lose the income from one of its operating trains.

I decided to omit this rule from our play since it's seemed designed to add a little flavor into the game and does not impact gameplay that much.

Note: By 18xx, I usually refer to the 1830 branch of the 18xx series and not the 1829 branch. From the BGG Wiki - "The 1829 branch games emphasize stock-picking and portfolio management while the 1830 branch concentrates more on financial prediction and stock market manipulation."

Bank has $8,000 - the same amount as 18AL so this shud play relatively quick since a $8k bank is easier to break - and $1,800 is given as starting capital divided among the players. In our 4-player game, each gets only $450 capital to start.

PRIVATE COMPANIES
18TN has five private companies ranging from lowest of $20 ($40, $70, $100) to the highest priced private at $175. Corporations (ie major companies that can lay tracks, run trains and have their shares floated to the stock market) can operate only when they've floated 60% of their shares.

With par value starting at $65 to $90, this means you can only start a major company on your own only if you buy one of the two lower price privates. With 5 private companies to go with 4 players, only one player can float a major company with his own funds, the others have to collaborate at the beginning.

The Privates do not contain variety of special abilities. With the exception of one, the privates block tile laying in their home hex and if sold to a company, allows the company one extra yellow tile laying in the home hex. Doing the free tile laying action does not close the private.

The most expensive private - Louisville & Nashville $175 - gives you the President cert (20%) of the L&N Railroad company. L&N has a special rule that allows it to float even with just 20% shares sold.

I find this greatly simplifies the auction of the private companies as players now only need to consider i) the location where the private grants the free tile laying action, and ii) the ROI (return-of-investment) of the private vs its par (purchase) value. Unlike in the other more complex 18xx games like 1856 where each private confers a different type of special abilities and players can spend a long time trying to understand the impact of each ability.

There's also a special rule that allows an operating company to buy a private on its first OR in order to activate the free tile laying action. But this purchase has to be at the private's face value.

Note: Buying a private after 3-trains are purchased can be done within the range of 0.5 - 1.5 its face value.

MAJOR COMPANIES
There are 6 major companies in this game; with two of them having a slight specific rule. I've already mentioned about one of them ie the Louisville & Nashville (L&N) which can float with just 20% shares sold.

The 2nd is the Illinois Central Railroad (IC) which has a President Cert comprising 30% shares (instead of the normal 20%). Not much difference except to start this company, you need to be able to afford its 30% President cert.

The other rules governing company shares work as per standard 18xx rules such as shares in Open Market pays dividend to the company, shares in green/yellow zones do not count towards hand limit and you can acquire up to 100% of shares in the yellow zone.

The 20% float for L&N looks like an important feature of the game. Firstly since only one or at most two players would be able to start a new company entirely using his own money in the first Stock Round, the others would have to collaborate to kickstart one company and later sell its shares to fund their own railroad companies.

18TN "encourages" this by having L&N float on just 20% share meaning it'll operate the moment someone buys the L&N private company. And since a company floats at full capitalization, once it floats those with money would usually invest their funds into those "operating" companies hoping for dividend payout and later selling them once their share prices have appreciated.

The Two Starting Companies
In our session L&N (bought by Lim) was the first to float at $90 par - I suppose since this company floats on just 20% and its President Cert is given to the owner of the L&N private, it'll always be the first company to float - while jack208 decided to start GM&O at $65 par. Both these companies have 4 tokens.

The other two - since they'd bought the more expensive privates - wouldn't have sufficient funds to float a new company on their own hence they chose to invest into one of the two companies already started. ayheng (below) decided to invest his funds into L&N (10%) and GM&O (30%), no doubt with the intention to sell them off for capital gains later. :P

phuah (below) also followed ayheng but he invested more into L&N (20%) instead of GM&O (10%). This resulted in a full subscription of GM&O shares causing its CMV (current market value) to bump up one box in the Stock Market table.

First OR (operating round) was rather uneventful... both L&N and GM&O didn't take up the option of buying any one of the privates for the tile-laying privilege and they do the normal laying of two yellow tiles and then buying just one 2-train (limited to one train purchase from the bank per OR until Phase 4),.

GM&O with its first train purchased from the bank in the first OR.

TILE LAYING
The game is speed up by allowing each operating railroad to lay two yellow tiles per OR. If a company acquires one of the private cos in its first OR, it can even lay a 3rd yellow tile as a free action.

Note: I played this wrong by suggesting companies lay two yellow tiles only on its first OR and only one yellow tile in subsequent ORs. While the misplayed rule applied to all companies, if we'd played it with the correct rules it would have speed up the railway network on the map.

GM&O started in the south-west (above) while L&N started at the north. There are three key spots in the map to fight for - Memphis (to the west of GM&O), Nashville (in the centre of the map) and Chattanooga (to the south-east part of the map).

The reason is that these three cities are designated as "P" cities which meant they can take one of the special brown/gray tiles which has the highest income value for a on-map city. The "wicked" thing is that there are only two brown P cities and just one gray P cities to fit into three cities.

The 3rd company was soon started by ayheng - Illinois Central Railroad (IC) - at $75 par. Phuah was still in investor mode. The IC is based in-between L&N and GM&O and therefore has access to existing tracks laid by GM&O which was already driving towards Nashville.

jack208 has good cashflow but not sufficient to start another company therefore he invested his spare funds into IC (above) as that new upstart shud be generating good capital gains in a few more rounds since it has quickly bought into a few 3-trains (below) to boost its immediate revenue.

When the IC came into the picture, the 3-trains were quickly bought up by the three existing railroad companies plying their business in Tennessee. jack208 quickly got GM&O to buy the first 4-trains (below) in order to rust everyone's 2-trains. At this juncture, Lim probably began to feel his first experience of train rush. :P

OPERATING A RAILROAD
Not much deviation from standard 18xx rules except for i) occurrence of Civil War when the second 4-train is purchased, and ii) delayed obsolescence for the 4-trains when the first 6-train is purchased.

The railroad network during the middle-game stage with three companies operating

In the mid-game, GM&O were ahead in the stock market (below) due to it not having to withhold any dividend. However in terms of EPS (earnings per share), L&N was tops at $31/eps. The CMV (current stock market value) is important in this game as the first company to reach the top value of $300 in CMV will end the game (similar to 18AL/18GA end-game condition).

The mid-game also saw those companies with >3 tokens starting to place their tokens into strategic positions (below) in an attempt to block the other companies from running into the lucrative routes.

THE SECONDS
This game has 6 major companies so there will come a point in time when one or more players start their second major companies. In this session, two of us decided to start the 2nd company while phuah jumped from Investor mode to form his first (and the last of the 6th companies).

ayheng was the first - since he has the Priority Deal card - and formed Southern Railways (SR) which is on the eastern part of the map while his first company IC sits on the western side. He's probably trying to make a East-West link. :P

phuah - who's next in turn order - started his first company in Tennessee Central Railway (TC). TC sits right on top of Nashville and would be in the thick of the actions, with a good network of railways tracks completed but could be tokened out of important (and lucrative) routes.

jack208 formed the last of the 6 majors, the Nashville, Chattanooga & St Louis Railroads (NCSL) which starts from Chattanooga and would be faced with expensive terrain-heavy builds all-around it. All three companies were floated at $90 par.

The NCSL quickly snapped up both the permanent 5-trains ($450/ea). jack208's other company, the GM&O was still running it's (old but trusty) 3-train and 4-train (below).

That left SR (ayheng) to purchase the first 6-train - which rusted everyone's 3-trains - and TC (phuah) to get the last 6-train - which then caused all 4-trains to be made obsolete (but delayed for a turn).

These two 6-trains didn't last more than one OR as it was bought back-to-back
by ayheng's SR and phuah's TC

TRAIN RUSH
In this game there appears to be minimal train rush at the beginning as each company can only buy one train per OR until 4-trains are out. However the southern area of the map is terrain-heavy meaning it requires money to (first) build there (some mountainous hex costing as much as $120 to lay the first yellow tile) therefore while the train rush is soft in the beginning, company still needs to make sure it has sufficient money in its kitty for placing tokens, getting new trains and laying tiles on terrain-heavy hexes.

But once 4-trains are out (there's only 3 of them) the train rush may catch you by surprise as there are only two 5-trains and two 6-trains which are permanent trains. The first 6-train will rust all 3-trains while the second 6-train will rust all 4-trains.

Can be nasty especially in this stage of the game you would probably have a few new companies forming and if they float at $90 par, they can all afford to buy one of the 6-train $600 or 8-train $700 trains forcing the obsolescence on the 4-trains.

As in our session, the two 5-trains and two 6-trains were all bought up in the same OR when three new companies were formed. This immediately rusts all 3-trains and 4-trains leaving existing companies prior to the three new companies with no trains and going into FTP (forced train purchase) mode.

4-trains have a delayed obsolescence though... ie they are still allowed to run for one more OR before being put out of commission. There was also one rule we played wrongly - one a train is designated "obsolete" even if it gets to run one more OR (delayed obsolescence) these "obsolete" trains cannot be sold to any other companies.

Lim - it shud be noted this is his first 18xx game - were struggling to get enough cashflow into his L&N in order to get one of the permanent trains... kept withholding dividends until the share price of L&N plummeted into the yellow zone.

His L&N were hit with FTP when the three new companies - NCSL, SR and TC - bought up all the permanent 5- and 6-trains forcing him to have to sell all his existing GM&O shares (20%) and one L&N share in order to contribute enough money (as President of L&N) to buy the 8-train (below). He still retains control of L&N with 50% shares, and survived (barely) his first FTP. phew.

The railroad network (below) towards end-game showing Nashville winning the fight for the single gray P tile which carried a $60 revenue city - the most lucrative city on the map however belongs to Cincinnati $80 which is located just east of L&N's base at Louisville.

We find the game's ending conditions - $300 top value for Stock Market or Bank Breaks - to be quite balanced. As GM&O ran towards the $300 top point in the Stock Market (it was just 3 ORs from that spot)...

Final position of the stock market (as the bank broke first)

... the companies were paying out a total of $1680 dividends per OR (see below) which means the bank will break soon. In our session, the bank broke before GM&O can hit the $300 top spot.

WHAT DO I THINK?
How does 18TN fare as a beginner's intro 18xx game compared to 18AL and 18GA?

Easy auction for private which has basic tile laying capabilities (and not variety of special powers which are usually not fully understood by newbie to 18xx)
Minimal (almost none) variance to its rules (except for the Civil War rule which I feel is highly optional)
Company floats on 60% and gets full capitalization
No early train-rush as you only buy one train per OR until 4-trains are out. Let a newbie settle into operating the company and learning the mechanics of the game early on before slamming them towards the end-game with the late train rush
No diesel train (highest is Type-8) simplifies the income calculation process towards end-game
An easy-going map with half of it (southern part) containing expensive terrains to build on, and the other half mostly flat terrains for free build, allows newbie to get a feel of both.
Balanced game end; I feel the bank will either break or one of the companies will hit the $300 stock market cap without getting delayed.
Game shud played around the 3 hr mark since the bank has $8,000 only. Our session above took about 3.5 hrs where I think about 0.5 hr of it were spent on rules briefing.

In 18TN I think I've finally found the "perfect" 18xx game to be used as an introduction game for newbies to the 18xx series. The 18AL/18GA are still good introduction games but since 18TN is more readily available as a game set, this comes as a better recommendation. In any case, all three are from the same designer Mark Derrick.

To discuss this game further, pls post your thoughts on our 18TN thread.

For those wishing to get a primer on the 18xx series, you are most welcome to check out our 18xx forum
http://boardgamecafe.net/community/forums/104/ShowForum.aspx

Here's a link to Boardgamegeek that describes the flavor of the 18xx series
Subject: So You've Always Wanted to Know What an 18xx Game is Like

Finally to those who are asking where they can buy this game, you can get it from Deep Thought Games. Ask for John Tamplin.

For more photos of this gaming session, visit our Flickr set
For more gaming reports, visit our Boardgame Meetup Reports Blog.
To discuss this gaming session, visit our forum in BoardgameCafe.net

To buy the games played in this meetup, visit our Web Store. We carry over 300+ games and provide prompt delivery to anywhere in Malaysia.

Fri 13/2/09 BGC Meetup at OTK Cheras - Galaxy Trucker, Bang, Santiago, 18TN and Agricola

jack208 — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 08:36:00 GMT

Gamers: Phuah (phuah), Lim (lim), Alvin (keealvin), Allen (blownfreaks), Yee Ling (crabzai), Heng (ayheng) and Jeff Au (jack208)

Games: Galaxy Trucker, Bang!, Santiago, 18TN and Agricola

Location: Old Town Kopitiam Cheras (Boardgamecafe.net) Location Map (wikimapia)
Date/Time: 13 February '09 (Fri) 8.00 PM - 5.30 AM

KL BOARDGAMES (FRIDAY 13TH) MEETUP REPORT @ OLD TOWN KOPITIAM CHERAS 13/2/09
by jack208

FRIDAY THE 13TH MEETUP

This was both Friday the 13 and Valentine's Day weekend. As usual, we carry on with our Fri Night Gaming at Old Town Kopitiam. With Phuah & Lim in attendance and this being ayheng's non-working week, we would be looking to game till the early morning of tomorrow.

Galaxy Trucker and Santiago were called, with Bang, Through the Ages, and Le Havre being possibilities. Here's the report of what we played for the evening.

GALAXY TRUCKER

The game Galaxy Trucker was first introduced by blownfreaks when he brought his set to OTK in Dec last year for a testdrive. Three of us - me, wolfx and blownfreaks - had a great time building our trucker ships under time pressure and then trying to survive the multiple meteroids that came crashing our way while trying to ferry goods back to sell!

This time ayheng requested for that as he wanted to sample what's the fuss about this FUN yet expensive game. At USD74.95 retail, it's at the TI3 price point yet in terms of component or even game length, it's nowhere near that epic game.

Galaxy Trucker does have a lot of stuff in its box but I suppose the main reason for its high price point is due to it not getting into the mainstream publisher and imported to US from Czech.

blownfreaks (with cap) explaining the Galaxy Trucker rules to the rest

I reached OTK to find most of the regulars were already there and as I ordered my dinner (with waiyan) I requested that they proceed with Galaxy Trucker since it's just a 4-player game (until you get the Big Expansion which can then play 5) and we've 4 players who have yet to experience trucking their ships thru the galaxy. :P

The game comprises two phases: the first where you build your trucker (ships) that'll be sent on a journey to carry some goods back which you can then sell for a profit. Obviously there'll be a few hazards along the way - pirates, smugglers and meteroids! - which can do all sorts of damages to your ship.

The Ship Building phase is the most frenzied (above) - and also the most FUN - since everybody builds at the same time, and the tiles used to build the ships are available in a pool that's free-for-all to everyone! Yup, you just flip open those building tiles and take whatever you want!!

There are certain rules to follow when placing those tiles to form your ship; but essentially you need to balance your ships with thrusters (else your ship ain't going to go any way fast), lasers (for protection against anything that's moving towards your ships), energy generators (to produce energy bars that you need to power your thrusters and lasers), shields, crew cabins (your crewmen need somewhere to sleep/live, no?) and storage cabins for carrying cargoes.

Let's look at some examples of what these ppl built for their 1st round.. :P

This is crabzai's ship (above) for the 1st round. A few lasers in front (those in purple), good amount of storage cabins with only one space for radioactive good (the storage tile in red), but powerful thrusters (five of them!). The ship seems to be quite low in terms of staffing, carrying only 6 crew.

ayheng built a rather good & balanced trucker (above)... hmm.. lasers seemed to be heavily slanted to the right-hand side (was he expecting lots of meteors coming that side?) but he'll lose the central thruster due to illegal build before this trucker can get off the ground.

Phuah's an analytical person... so if you ask them to knock something up under time pressure, that's not exactly what he would luv to do. His trucker tells the same story... hehe but it did have better laser protection system though it has only one twin thrusters so it does not look like going anyway fast.

Now this is something you dun get to see everyday.. Lim must have been going on some Green (environmental) programme lately as he focused his trucker to be.. well, green. His ship is consists heavily of the green shield and the green energy generators.

In fact he has so much generators - 19 of them - that he could go to the end of the galaxy and back! :P

ayheng had earlier asked why there seemed to be a dearth of energy generator tiles... now he knew where they went. LOL

Once your ship is ready, you set off on a journey with the other players. During the journey, you'll encounter various challenges, obstacles and some opportunities. The trucker who best maximizes the opportunities and minimizes the hazards would stand a great chance of winning the game.

The above board tracks the ships journey and also act as a turn order sequence for the four ships. Being in front of the turn order is sometimes advantageous (eg when you encounter a planet card) and sometimes not (when you encounter pirates).

You'll encounter opportunities like the above - Abandoned Station - where the player (in turn order) who has more than 5 crewmen will be able to collect the two cargoes (yellow, green) at the cost of losing one travel day. Good exchange if you ask me.

There'll also be opportunities such as the Planets flight card (above) where you get to load your ships with cargoes (to sell back at base for profit). However you would want to be in front in terms of the turn order as you then get to choose first which planet to visit (as not all of them provide expensive cargoes).

The space journey is also filled with many hazards; Meteoric storms being one of them (and it seems to happen quite often). When your ship is flying thru a meteoric storm, you'll need all your navigational skills (and most of all luck - since it involves throwing dice) to avoid getting your ship mangled or worse, dismantled!

Small meteors you can avoid easily as long as your ship does not have too many "exposed" parts. Large meteors unfortunately are more difficult to deal with, you need lasers to cut them down to sizes.

Carrying cargoes back safely to base is the key to getting good profits (and money is what wins you the game). The cargoes are categorized into the radioactive (red) and non-radioactive (yellow, green, blue).

Radioactive cargoes are the most expensive but you need special cabins (red) to hold them. Non-radioactive cargoes go from yellow (expensive) to blue (cheapest).

ayheng's ship (above) looked like it has managed to get a good amount of cargoes to ship back. Getting them back safely however is another matter.

Uhm.. after a heavy meteoric storm, ayheng's ship was hit by a large meteor on the port side (see above).. and things started to unravel. Problem is, once your ship has exposed parts it doesn't travel well especially in space...

This is how ayheng's ship ended up as it trudged back to base... not too bad except it has lost all the cargoes it meant to ship back. Amazingly 4 of its crew managed to make their way back with the ship.

Basically after Round 1, you can continue to Round 2 (rinse-n-repeat) but with a larger ship footprint. In Round 1, you build a rather small ship and it's easy to avoid meteors etc when you have such a small footprint.

Template for Round 1's ship

In Round 2, you get to build a ship with larger footprint.. therefore increasing the probability of getting hit by meteor along the journey. I also find that building a large ship tends to be more difficult as finding the right & matching component tiles can be really difficult.

This is the larger ship footprint for Round 2

It goes without saying the ship's footprint will increase further in Round 3 and Round 4.

In the next round, ayheng built an almost-perfect ship. Structurally it has no exposed parts, has space for 7 normal cargoes and two radioactive goods, 6 thrusters in total and ample cabins for the crew. It has shields protecting all four sides of the ship with laser systems on the front and both port and starboard sides.

Question is - how would this ship fare on its journey?

A snapshot of ayheng's ships halfway thru the journey, crew staying strong (the purple crew is in fact an alien who boost the firepower of this ship), and the storage cabins are almost 80% filled with cargoes. But how will this stand a meteoric storm?

The ship sailed thru a massive meteoric storm and only lost a component on its port side (see above) with the ship otherwise relatively untouched. Yeah!

We decided to do one more round of Galaxy Trucker since everyone seemed to be enjoying it. This time we built a Round 3 ships (with even larger footprint).

The above was my Round 3 trucker. Pretty good effort but not fully maximizing it as you can notice the blank spaces below which I did not make full use of. With a larger footprint, it's harder getting the right components to build a "complete" ship.

Thought I'd a strong number of crew - after that terrible experience in the Dec 08 session where some sumgglers came and abducted 3 (and all) of my crew leaving my ship in relatively very good condition but derelict! - but a wave of alien epidemic swept thru all ships and reduced half of my crew in those cabins that were inter-connected.

Everyone's verdict is that this is a fun filler-type game that we can bring out easily to either kickstart the gaming session or wind down after some heavy gaming. blownfreaks has ordered the Big Expansion; that should add to the fun factor!

Bang!

ayheng has been bringing his Bang! set along for the past few sessions, hoping to get the seven ppl needed to do a good Bang! session. Today we've seven so it's wild wild west ala Bang!!

Roles and characters were dealt and Phuah was appointed as the sheriff. Deputies unknown yet but ayheng drew the Willy the Kid character (can play unlimited Bang cards) which is always a threat.

I was one of the three Outlaws so was hoping ayheng was one too. :P Whether you are with the law or outlaws, there's nothing better than having Willy the Kid (the other would be Slab the Killer) on your side.

blownfreaks started by firing on the Sheriff. Obviously once the outlaws unmasked early and if you have Willy the Kid on the table, the other outlaws shouldn't waste any more time and have to converge immediately on the Sheriff and hope to force a quick ending.

Sadly we outlaws couldn't last long. I was done in by a dynamite (lit by keealvin, one of the deputies) while blownfreaks was brought down by a hail of bullets from the Sheriff and Willy the Kid (who's his 2nd deputy).

With lim being the sole surviving outlaw, two deputies still alive and kicking and one of the deputy is Willy the Kid; the end is near for the outlaws and the Sheriff did prevail in this session.

Santiago

After Bang! we moved on to Santiago. Another game with high screwage factor.

Not sure if ayheng will be writing something for this session. If yes, I'll copy/paste over here later.

18TN Tennessee & Kentucky

The Round 2 session started with a game that we used to play quite often at OTK but have not seen the table recently - an 18xx game. This time we did the Tennessee & Kentucky map of 18TN. Will leave its sessrep to a different blog entry. :)

AGRICOLA

After the 18TN game (400am?) Phuah and Lim were still going strong, while ayheng decided to take his leave. The three of us ended tonight's session with a quick 3-player's game of Agricola.

Until next week!

For more photos of this gaming session, visit our Flickr set
For more gaming reports, visit our Boardgame Meetup Reports Blog.
To discuss this gaming session, visit our forum in BoardgameCafe.net

To buy the games played in this meetup, visit our Web Store. We carry over 300+ games and provide prompt delivery to anywhere in Malaysia.

Sat 7/2/09 BGC Meetup at Citi Cafe Pudu - Agricola and In the Year of the Dragon

jack208 — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 04:12:00 GMT

Gamers: Alan (alanwsl), Jamie (jamiechen), Stan (stanpang), Jacques (jacquesaw) and Jeff Au (jack208)

Games: Agricola and In the Year of the Dragon

Location: Citi Cafe Pudu (Boardgamecafe.net) Location Map (wikimapia)
Date/Time: 7 February '09 (Sat) 9.00 PM - 2.00 AM

KL BOARDGAMES MEETUP REPORT @ CITI CAFE PUDU 7/2/09
by jack208

FEB7 MEETUP

The Pudu gamers have been rather quiet on the boardgame scene lately. It's customary for us to gather for a prosperity dinner during Chinese New Year, and last week after our dinner gathering we did a session of Agricola and Phase 10, and this week they've been asking for Agricola to come to the table again!

AGRICOLA

There are reasons why Agricola appeals to a wide group of people; the theme of farming and the cute animeeples and vegemeeples are two of the many. But it's relatively (deceptively) non-brain-burning gameplay is probably another.

Now dun get me wrong. Agricola is not a light (nor easy) game.. but compared to Le Havre, Caylus, Die Macher or even 18xx it's so much more pleasing to play Agricola than those mentioned. I suppose that's it's key appeal. And why it's staying at its #1 position in Boardgamegeek.

This is only their 2nd game so I suppose everyone's still exploring things around the game...

alanwsl going for stables to keep animals and also to claim unused spaces. He also has some interesting minor improvements and went for the clay oven (below) as his primary food source.

jacquesaw who had a bit too many points deducted for unused spaces in the last game, improved in this session by quickly getting his fences up and plowing a good number of fields (below).

jacquesaw also had the Yeoman Farmer occupation in place which helped him to keep deductions low at end-game.

jamie faced tough challenges in this game keeping her family well-fed (below).

jack208's rather bare farm, and his occupations and improvements (below).

stanpang spent a bit too much time getting more than a fair share of occupation cards to the table. While they helped him in alleviating his food problem, they didn't do much to help him set up his farm for the end-game scoring...

And he was screwed twice towards the late-game stages - once when I took the 4 food in the Fishing space (he has a card that can double the food in that space) and later when alanwsl took the last fencing in the last round of the game resulting in stanpang not being able to fence - even though he already has the woods. Ouch.

Everyone enjoyed their 2nd game of Agricola, and I'm sure they'll be back for more!

IN THE YEAR OF THE DRAGON

Citi Cafe closes at 2am unlike OTK which runs 24-hr in Cheras. Therefore we need to pick a short game after Agricola and there's no better game that gives you tough decision making in a short 1.5 hrs time than In the Year of the Dragon.

I bought this while I was in Sydney last Nov, but have only played it once. The OTK group has played this a couple more times than me. :( So this is just my 2nd session for ItYofD yet the rules are still clear in my head!

In the Year of the Dragon is essentially a forward planning game where you know what resources you can have, the sequence of events - usually bad - that'll happen and what resources/actions are needed to avert them. You do have to adjust your plans according to the actions of your other players as everyone's basically fighting for the same resources or actions to stave off the catastrophes that are ahead of them.

Lots of tough decisions in this game.. yet the game plays in around 1.5 hours (assuming ppl do not AP) which is very good as a filler in-between those heavy games.

Need to remind myself to get this to the table more often.

I went for the banker strategy (money) early in the game but having a good supply of money - which allowed me to go last in turn order - did not do me much good as alanwsl was the eventual winner in this game.

For more photos of this gaming session, visit our Flickr set
For more gaming reports, visit our Boardgame Meetup Reports Blog.
To discuss this gaming session, visit our forum in BoardgameCafe.net

To buy the games played in this meetup, visit our Web Store. We carry over 300+ games and provide prompt delivery to anywhere in Malaysia.

Fri 6/2/09 BGC Meetup at OTK Cheras - Samurai, Acquire, Agricola and Brass

jack208 — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 07:51:00 GMT

Gamers: Angelo (angelo), Phuah (phuah), Lim (lim), Ho (ho), Allen (blownfreaks) and Jeff Au (jack208)

Games: Samurai, Acquire, Agricola and Brass

Location: Old Town Kopitiam Cheras (Boardgamecafe.net) Location Map (wikimapia)
Date/Time: 6 February '09 (Fri) 8.00 PM - 7.30 AM

KL BOARDGAMES MEETUP REPORT @ OLD TOWN KOPITIAM CHERAS 6/2/09
by jack208

FEB6 MEETUP

While most people would have returned to work in this week (from the long Chinese New Year break), most are still likely to be busy with CNY dinners and other engagements. Initially I'd thought there's not going to be any gaming session tonite, until Phuah smsed me saying that his group is coming down. Oh great!

Samurai

blownfreaks was the first to arrive, with a German colleague - Angelo - who's not yet heard of Settlers of Catan but enjoys boardgaming. He's in town on work matters and would be leaving for Germany but today he's invited to sample the joy of euro gaming! :)

It's always good to welcome a new boardgamer.. and what better game to start than with Knizia's Samurai which plays very well with 3 people, and easy to get into. The only "difficult" part might be understanding the scoring.

Welcome, Angelo, to Boardgamecafe's OTK gaming evenings!

Haven't played Samurai for a long time so it's good to see it on the table again. I remembered playing a very tense Samurai at the Awana Euro Game Retreat in 2006. That game really drew out the flavor of the fight for control of Japan. :)

The three factions which you are fighting for - high helmets (politics), Buddha (religious)
and rice fields (farmers)

In Samurai, you are fighting to have control of the influence of either of the three factions in Japan - the farmers (rice fields), the politicians (high helmets) and the monks (Buddhas). Control of both factions win you the game outright, while control of one would allow you to contest for the position of Shogun ruling over all of Japan.

Angelo was very quick to pick up the game, and in fact our scores all tied at 5 with each of us controlling one faction. blownfreaks mentioned Angelo would have won the game by the tie-breaker (ie player with the most "all pieces" captured wins)

Acquire

By now, Phuah and his group has arrived. We now have six and blownfreaks happened to bring his Acquire (50th Anniversary edition) along. There are not many 6-player games that's as good as Acquire. No better game to intro Angelo further into the Euro Gaming addiction. hehe.

Ho, Lim, Phuah and Angelo wheeling & dealing at their first game of Acquire

The proliferation of new startups early in the game (see below) made it difficult to keep control of any one chain, and everyone needs to be on their toes to identifying which chain(s) would be candidates for early mergers and which would be keepers for end-game.

jack208 and blownfreaks bought quickly for control of Sackson but alas after our initial "rush", everything went quiet on this counter until almost end-game (where I actually lost control of the minority stake to Ho, duh! Oh well, I did get control of Tower... you can't win them all)

Towards end-game (see pic above), three chains were safe - Tower (Jack208/Blownfreaks), Sackson (Blownfreaks/Ho) and American (Angelo/Phuah) - with two smaller chains (Imperial and Continental in top right) waiting to be merged with one of the three.

Game was won by Phuah who didn't even control any of the end-game counters (Tower/Sackson/American). He made his money from the early (and frequent) mergers of the counters and being the minority shareholder for a couple of the end-game chains.

AGRICOLA - Session #1

After a delicious appetizer (Samurai) and sumptuous main course (Acquire), it's time to serve Angelo the creme-de-la-creme dessert - Agricola!

blownfreaks (left) explaining to Angelo the concept of farming in Agricola

We've seem to wean off this game lately, with Le Havre and some oldies coming back into the tables but lately we are seeing Agricola back in vogue!

Playing 3-player Agricola for the first time and the immediate thing I notice is the scarcity of clay. There are two clay action cards but each yielded only a single clay! Aiyoh...

Wood is still abundance in 3p Agricola but clay is not!

I appeared to have drawn a very good combo-set of Occupation and Minor Improvements (see below). Sadly I couldn't maximize them and I think with an over-focus on playing these cards, my entire game went down the kitchen sink! :P

The set of Occupation and Minor Improvement cards drawn for this session.
The "Mini Pasture" was given to me by my RHS player and was not in my
starting hand.

Would be interesting to see if those cards above are at all good for combos. Perhaps a solo game using those cards can shed me some light. :P

After Agricola, Angelo has to say goodbye for the evening. He did say he enjoyed the evening's menu of Euro Gaming and will definitely be coming back for more the next time he's in KL. Oh yeah, another convert to euro boardgaming! Kudos to blownfreaks for his active canvassing...

AGRICOLA - Session #2

When a game is back in vogue, playing it once is not enough right? So Agricola came back to the table for the 2nd time in the same evening. This time it's another 3-player game with jack208, Phuah and Lim.

The vegemeeples making their appearances for the 1st time in OTK!

I've bought the vegemeeples add-on which was shipped together with my Le Havre a few months back but haven't played it with my Agricola set. This evening the vegemeeples were added to the set and I've to admit the animeeples and vegemeeples improve the playing experience.

Lim building three pastures; both good for storing the few types of animals the farm can rear and also for end-game VPs. However he didn't manage to use all the other unused spaces but it was just his first game and I'm sure being the experienced gamer he is, that'll pick up over time.

I went for the cooking heath in this session, and less obsessed with my Occupation & Minor Improvement cards. I did play my fair share of them cards but spent more time on balancing my other resources and farming matters.

I blogged about the L-Deck (also sent together with my Le Havre purchase) earlier (click here to read). As mentioned in that blog entry, half the cards in the L-Deck are in German! Aiyoh... should have gotten Angelo to translate for me!!

BRASS

Thanks to aanemesis for teaching us this game (a few weeks back) and while he whooped us back then (sessrep still pending), I find the game challenging and always keen to bring it back to the table.

Initial set-up in Brass; your building tiles stacked with the lower-technology ones on top

When we did the learning game with aanemesis, it was a 3-player game (Brass can play four). aanemesis did mention it's best with 4 as the fight for the board will be so much tougher.

Anyway there's only 3 players for R2 tonite so it'll have to be 3p Brass. :P

Phuah jumped on to the resource strategy, quickly building coal mines for us to use (which will score VPs for him once we've exhausted the supplies in his coal mines) while Lim and jack208 focus on setting up cotton mills to sell.

jack208's (green) industry during the Canal era

jack208 focused on the top part of the Lancashire (above) while Phuah & Lim were slogging it out over southern Lancashire (below). A plus point for this game is that I did not see any distinct advantage for me (jack208) even though two of the three players in the game were fighting over the south while I built at the north. Not all 3p games carry this balance.

... while Phuah (yellow) and Lim (red) fought at the south

To a certain extent, the choice of location - and industries - we based our strategy on will be dictated by the location/industry cards we draw to our hands.

This was one of the "random" element I dread (before playing the game) but after playing it twice, I do not find it too unbalancing or random. Sometimes you may not get a good card draw - or the location you need - but you can always work around it, or as most good businessman (in particular during the Lancashire period) do, they just switch to their Plan B.

Phuah pondering where to expand his biz in Lancashire

In this session Lim was focused on shipping cotton, while Phuah was very into providing resources for our thriving business. He built the most coal mines and iron works, and managed to tap into quite a good number of VPs from this approach.

The other observation was jack208 took two $30 loans while lim took one $30 loan but phuah managed through out the game without loan. I notice phuah tends to do well at optimization games like this and Age of Steam (also by the same designer, Martin Wallace).

With only 3 shipyards; two were built by jack208 and one by phuah so Lim who perhaps have focused a bit too heavily on cotton mills missed out on the good VPs provided by the shipyard.

4-player Brass, anyone?

AXIS & ALLIES - The Big Report!

From what I'd thought were no-session tonite, we ended this session at 7.30am! Ah well, just in time for breakfast rhyen would used to say. :)

What's next? Stay tuned for the BIG sessrep of our first session of Axis & Allies 2004 Edition between ayheng and jack208! If you can't wait, enjoy the photos of our A&A session here.

For more photos of this gaming session, visit our Flickr set
For more gaming reports, visit our Boardgame Meetup Reports Blog.
To discuss this gaming session, visit our forum in BoardgameCafe.net

To buy the games played in this meetup, visit our Web Store. We carry over 300+ games and provide prompt delivery to anywhere in Malaysia.

Fri 30/1/09 BGC Meetup at OTK Cheras - Le Havre, Die Macher

jack208 — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 22:41:00 GMT

Gamers: Ken (wolfx), Allen (blownfreaks), Yee Ling (crabzai) and Jeff Au (jack208)

Games: Le Havre and Die Macher

Location: Old Town Kopitiam Cheras (Boardgamecafe.net) Location Map (wikimapia)
Date/Time: 30 January '09 (Fri) 8.00 PM - 2.00 AM

KL BOARDGAMES (CNY) MEETUP REPORT @ OLD TOWN KOPITIAM CHERAS 30/1/09
by jack208

JAN30 MEETUP

This is the Chinese New Year (CNY) week and today was the 5th day of the Chinese Lunar Year. Not many gamers are around and with ayheng on working Saturdays and most regulars either still at their hometown or busy visiting relatives, it was left to a few of us to do some CNY gaming.

LE HAVRE

wolfx mentioned he's fresh from a good non-working break and is ready for his PHD (permanent head damage) as he suggested we do two pretty heavy game back-to-back in the same evening - Le Havre and Die Macher!

blownfreaks was obviously game for it as I knew he has been wanting to learn the Die Macher game. So I brought Le Havre while blownfreaks brought his still unpunched Die Macher.

Since all four already knew how to play this latest gem from Uwe (of Agricola fame), we quickly set up the board + cards and got started with the Le Havre game.

The two wharves are coming out very late in this game (see order of appearance for standard buildings above) which meant that ships won't be built so early (especially the iron ships) and players need to find other source for food beside ships.

This is also one of the features I like about this game; while the standard buildings always consist of the same 30 buildings, their order of appearance will to a certain extent influence your strategy. If you are thinking of using a shipping line strategy in this game, you better reconsider (with the late appearance of wharves). :P

As an example, in this session the Bakerhouse - which converts grain to bread (provides 2 food) and money - was built by the town fairly early in the game. This meant going the grain/bread approach to get food and money is very viable.

Joinery (selling food for money) was also built early so money won't be a problem in this game. I noticed the pace of building seemed to be slower in this game with the usual builders like crabzai and blownfreaks focusing on resources instead.

The 2nd wharf was actually built by the town - the first one was built by me - and from the picture above, the town has built about 6 standard buildings....

However this game really came ALIVE when blownfreaks bought one of the special building - Picket Line! The picket line essentially forces the other player to take tokens from the Offer space whenever the active player has activated this card. So you can't like say go pick another building action on your turn. Evil!

Note: The Picket Line (#44) is part of the 12 Essen bonus special buildings
(which means it's not part of the standard Le Havre set of 36 special buildings).

The screwage factor of the Picket Line card is that it forces the other players to choose the "Take Resource" action - and can't choose any other action - once the active player chose Picket Line as his action (and he gets first dip on the resource piles). Active player needs to pay its owner 1 franc to use the building but if chosen with right timing can hurt the other player.

blownfreaks was first to jump to the conclusion that the Picket Line is a very powerful card if used in conjunction with the Black Market especially if executed with the right timing.

The Black Market building allows the active player to take 2 resources where their pile is empty, and with the right timing can yield you up to 8 resources in that turn since all the other players now need to take from the offer spaces!

wolfx had thought the Picket Line can only be used once - which would made it less powerful but it's still a painful one-round screwage card - but blownfreaks insisted the Picket Line can be used multiple times until the last round; which he duly did! You can almost hear the "groans" every time Picket Line was chosen.

(above) I switched from bread (grain) to processed meat (cattle) as my primary food source as with the constant use of the Picket Line, food level was getting very low and most of us were already up to 3-5 loans. I was also not able to get enough coal for use as energy source and instead have to go with charcoal.

Everyone seemed to agree we were huffing and puffing a bit more than usual for food in this session (compared to our past sessions). Not having sufficient food to feed your workers in Le Havre is not as unforgiving as Agricola, but still you need to ensure you got a fairly good food supply in-place before you can focus your time on other activities which gain VPs.

Even as we entered into the end-game, most of the standard buildings were built by the town (see above) instead of being built by players. For eg, I'd only built 8 buildings (see below) as the game came to a conclusion.

And all these partly due to the multiple use of the Picket Line which caused havoc to our game plan, forcing us to take resource offers when there were other better action options etc. :P

blownfreaks (right) with wolfx and the much-talked about Picket Line card

In hindsight this game was skewed due to the (illegal) multiple use of the Picket Line. However I've also commented during the game that i) the Picket Line is actually available for all to use, and ii) it's not really as powerful as it seems. With multiple usage allowed, it's obviously a very strong card for its owner to play - as the other players have to pay 1 franc to use it - but with single use, it's a good card but doesn't unbalance the game.

blownfreaks didn't win the game albeit abusing the Picket Line as often as he wanted so the card - while painful (hehe) to everyone - is definitely not unbalancing the game. I suspect the late arrival of the two wharves also contributed to this strange (and low-scoring) session where everything didn't seem to flow as smoothly for everyone as it used to be.

Can't wait to play Le Havre again!

Die Macher

wolfx has been wanting to learn Die Macher - perhaps he harbors hope of a successful switch to a political career - and since blownfreaks was always keen to get his copy of Die Macher to the table, this was to be our 2nd game of the evening.

wolfx (left) and blownfreaks getting into the Die Macher game

As we did not intend to do R2 and it's getting late into the evening, we decided to do a 4-round elections as a learning game for everyone. The full game lasts 7 rounds where players contest for one state in each round.

Obviously resources - contributions ($$), shadow cabinets, money - would be less tight in a 4-round game. Furthermore this game is best when there are 5-players and we were only four. But as a learning game, a 4- (or 5) round election is always good.

I will not delve into the game rules here but briefly the game is about fighting for the control of each state elections. As can be seen in the above round-table, each quarter pie area represented one state where each party would send it's delegates to hold meetings, convert them into votes which would win them seats in the Parliament.

In-between all these, the party need to communicate it's party agendas to the voters. Political agendas are also set at state- and national-level. Matching your party's political agendas with the state agendas would obviously gain you more votes in that state election.. but having your party's agendas aligned with the national agenda gains you the crucial VPs to win the game.

It's all a matter of balancing your priorities as you trudged along from one state to the other canvassing support for your party and its delegates, yet at the same time keeping a heads-up on the national agendas that seem to keep changing.

And then there's the matter of funding. Ahem. Getting a political machinery moving costs lots of money. Yes I'm sure your party has various fund-raising activities, and your membership base would also contribute a certain amount of funds for your campaign.

But to have control of the media.. sorry I mean to be able to "influence" the media (sic), to be able to get some of the ministries to pass some of your agendas - all these require much more money than you could hope to raise thru normal fund-raising activities.

So where do we go from here? Aha.. there are contribution cards you can play after each round which would give you anything from $5k to $50k (note: $50k is considered a substantial amount of money in this game).

However - yes it comes with a price - if you choose to accept these "contributions", you might have people deserting your party as they perceived it to be less "honest" about the questionable contributions. If you refuse the contributions, you hope that sending out a "Look, my party has integrity" message would increase your membership base and win your more votes.

wolfx looking as honest as he can be before the game corrupted him

wolfx, with his innocent-looking face and claiming to be absolutely honest decided to do the latter ie. refused a $50k top-drawer bribe contributions in favor of integrity!

Unfortunately no one took his virtue on board, and he didn't get the return in membership nor votes he had expected (see below). He then realized what a piss-poor returns he got for refusing the contributions! It finally dawned on him that everyone has a "price" and you need to dance with the devil if you are to succeed in politics. :P

You get membership increase when you refused a contributions. Each member is worth $1k per members payout round (alternating) so you need to balance that recurring membership revenue against immediate $$ from the contributions. Accepting the contributions would result in a decrease in your membership base.

This game IMHO is the only game that closely mirrors the challenges and decisions you'll face if running a political party fighting an election campaigns for state seats. You'll find you have so many agendas and priorities to juggle, and while you want to remain on principle, you also need to be aware of when to bend where the wind blows.

Really really great game even though it's more than 20 yrs old. Kudos to Valley Games for reprinting this game - which has been OOP (out-of-print) - for some time. It's still best played with 5 players and over the full 7 rounds. Learning the game is not difficult even though it does seem to have a daunting rule book (get someone to teach you, it's easier).

Let's hope we can do a 5-player full game some time soon.

For more photos of this gaming session, visit our Flickr set
For more gaming reports, visit our Boardgame Meetup Reports Blog.
To discuss this gaming session, visit our forum in BoardgameCafe.net

To buy the games played in this meetup, visit our Web Store. We carry over 300+ games and provide prompt delivery to anywhere in Malaysia.

Fri 9/1/09 BGC Meetup at OTK Cheras - Imperial, Hey That's My Fish, King of Siam, China Moon

jack208 — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 05:59:00 GMT

Gamers: Ken (wolfx), Allen (blownfreaks), Yee Ling (crabzai), Cliff (cliff), Ian (shrapnel), Cheryl (cmun), John (johnlim) & galfren, Phuah, Ooi, Lim, Wai Yan (neu), Heng (ayheng), and Jeff Au (jack208)

Games: Imperial, Hey That's My Fish, Ice Flow, King of Siam, Perudo Dice, Stone Age and Le Havre

Location: Old Town Kopitiam Cheras (Boardgamecafe.net) Location Map (wikimapia)
Date/Time: 9 January '09 (Fri) 8.00 PM - 5.30 AM

KL BOARDGAMES MEETUP REPORT @ OLD TOWN KOPITIAM CHERAS 9/1/09
by ayheng & jack208

JAN9 MEETUP R1

The 2nd meetup of '09 at OTK. For this session, some of our old-timers - Ian (shrapnel), Cheryl (cmun) and their frens John Lim & his girlfren - made an impromptu appearance at Old Town Kopitiam. Haven't seen shrapnel & cmun since our Angkor trip last Nov.

HEY THAT'S MY FISH

After a quick dinner, neu started a game of Hey That's My Fish with shrapnel and cmun...

Was told Perudo Dice (aka Liar's Dice) was also played in this table....

Imperial

On the other table, ayheng was getting the rest into Imperial. We just did Imperial last week (read last week's sessrep) where we played using the standard rules of Investor card and starter bond distribution. In our forum we discussed about trying out the "No Investor Card" variant which we were told plays 10 times better!

ayheng (middle) explaining the rules of the game to crabzai (right) who's playing Imperial for her first time

ayheng's session report follows, with some additional notes/thoughts from jack208.

It’s the 1900s, and Imperialism is in full swing. Unbeknownst to the six great Imperial nations of mighty Europe, five great manipulators, puppeteers, shadowy secret society figures have step forth to steer the fates of the nations.

jack208: Some notes on our No-Investor-Card variant. We played without the Investor Card (ie. the Investor space only pays out dividend to shareholders if it's landed on) and all players get 18m and can freely invest in the bonds (one bond per nation).

Investment is only allowed when a nation's marker lands on or passes the Investor space. Beginning with the player controlling the nation, he can invest (or upgrade) one bond of the active nation. Players not controlling any nation can invest (or upgrade) one bond of any nation.

This variant is slightly different from the official No-Investor card variant where players can invest at the end of each turn! We actually played this (2nd) variant next week (ie 16-Jan). Watch for that sessrep for my opinions on which variants play better.

The mysterious jack208 (above), master puppeteer and cameraman, invested in Russia (purple), Austria-Hungary (yellow) and Italy (green), reserving some cash and laying low for the opportune moment to strike.

Cunning wolfx (above), invests in Italy, France (blue) and controls Germany (black).

Wise crabzai, takes control of Italy and Russia to put some pressure on Austria-Hungary.

Mysterious blownfreaks, takes hold of Austria-Hungary and France.

While I (ayheng), Imperial narrator, invests in Austria-Hungary, France and controls England (red).

jack208: In a 5-player game if we play without the starting fixed-bond distribution, all players get 18 million (instead of 13m) and we each get to invest optionally one bond in each of the 6 nations; control of a nation going to the investor who made the largest contribution.

In this game, I was contemplating control of Austria but then decided to just opt not to control any nation and watch how the game develops and find out if it's better to jump in for control of a nation once things started moving. Hope this explains why I opted for no-control at game-start.

The stage is set and the game begins. First order of the day: the Factory action. Probably a case of group think, but it is best to be conservative.

Next step: Production. Very predictable.

jack208: While everyone seemed to take Factory as their de facto first move (is this the Settler role of Puerto Rico?) the choice of the first factory among the nations was interesting. While the others went for balance (ie. army vs navy); England and Austria chose to specialize in naval and land forces respectively.

England is always an enigma and while it's not the "weakest" nation as most perceived it to be, it's also a hard nation to play well though I've seen rhyen ran a very strong England once. :P

England's choice of having a naval base as her first factory indicated she wanted to fight for control of the sea while Austria's third army base implied there could be an infantry rush in the Middle East.

I watched Austria's development with much interest as blownfreak invested 9m to control Austria (and out of money as he also sunk in 9m for France) while I gave 6m to Austria and has 6m cash remaining.

Ok, here’s where things start to get interesting. England skipped the first maneuvering to go on a second production.

Although this seems like a good idea and the extra sea power seems effective in battling France and Germany, the fact is that England still can’t take on both countries at one go. Next time I will recommend to do a land factory as the 1st factory action.

jack208: What England did was the Double-Rabbit move (ie produce twice then only move). I can't remember if rhyen used the same start but he did have good control of the seas around England. I wouldn't discount this move so quickly... may need to explore a bit more. Ada potensi. :P

jack208 did a hostile takeover and took over Austria-Hungary (above) by upgrading his 6m Austria-Hungary bond to 12m.

jack208: This was precipitated by Austria opting to form a strong land forces (with possibly two productions in-between maneuvers) that'll rush out to grab control markers in neighboring provinces, which would drive her taxation level to 9 or 10m - and more importantly a personal performance bonus of 4m. hehe

England did the first taxation (below) followed by everybody else.

Austria-Hungary ended up ahead and profiting a very happy pirating jack208.

jack208: Austria actually did even better than I expected (all blownfreaks good work haha). It managed to tax eventually at 11m (+6) which meant I pocketed a cool 6m bonus for my additional 6m investment. :)

England goes on another production spree.

jack208: At this juncture, I thought England were doing pretty ok continuously pumping out new ships from her shipyards and making it difficult for France to get control of the English Channel. At the same time Germany has already taken control of both Belgium & Holland meaning France need to consider going south for her expansion (or risk a drawn-out naval battle with England which she may not win).

Followed by everyone else. It’s an arms race!

Italy (crabzai) took advantage of war between England and France to expand.

jack208: wolfx also took the same opportunity to do first mover advantage up north with Germany (below) and controlled Russia from easily moving out to the Scandinavian. I think wolfx's Germany was the key to preventing the Russo-Italiano combo (crabzai) growing uncontested too early in the game.

jack208: This is what happens when a nation chooses to pay out dividends (Investor action)... those greedy investors are in it for the money only la! :p

blownfreaks takes back Austria-Hungary, can he manage to use Austria-Hungary and France to get Italy under control?

England tries to maintain sea supremacy.

And tax ahead again!

However the taxation is too low, nobody gives England a second look. jack208 instead determines Italy to be the best investment and takes it under his control.

jack208: This was one of the key moments for me as having control of both Italy and Austria (back) allowed me to expand east & west-wards putting pressure on both Russia (east) and France (west).

crabzai let go of Italy and consolidates on to Russia.

As blownfreaks was busy defending Austria-Hungary, I stole France from under his nose.

Which resulted in an economic and military cooperation between England and France.

jack208: Now this was when I felt that the game was slipping away from me. Italy-Austria were strong but England-France can be powerful as well since a strong England-France could meant Italy-Austria are sandwiched between Germany-Russia. Not a good place for me to be. :(

This was what I feared (see below).. with England no longer a threat to the French, they started moving south.. and soon were standing in the Western Mediterranean Sea and directly threatening Italian's bases.

jack208: By now, blownfreaks has gone into Investor mode and started spreading his investment across the nations.

jack208: A good move by wolfx (below), buying up France bonds hoping to gain control of France and use it possibly to hit back against England which has been a thorn in his Germany.

Sadly the cooperation doesn’t give immediate benefits to France. In fact, France has to withhold taxation to fend off Italy and Germany!

The final run-up to the end. Both England and France are behind due to constant pressure from Germany and Italy.

This is me (ayheng) pondering my last move.

This game I did not do too good due to the fact that England wasn’t well invested for a quick payout. The Factory action also had to be skipped due to lack of funds. England ended dead last while France managed to end first through a last desperate move. However the move still wasn’t enough to win the game.

Austria-Hungary changed hands several times during the game but it was jack208 who made the most out of it from the taxation bonus. I also used Austria-Hungary in a final takeover to delay Italy’s final taxation and let France win. blownfreaks benefitted from this late French surge to power past an Italy-focused jack208.

Germany and Russia went relatively unchecked and helped wolfx and crabzai respectively to finish in a good position.

Which meant I was dead last! Oh well, at least I learned something to hatch better schemes for the next Imperial session.

jack208: I made two terrible mistakes in the end-game. Firstly I didn't remember to check if others can take over either my Italy or Austria. I'd both set-up at the Investor step for me to launch Italy (since I was heavily invested in this country) into the Taxation step - even at the cost of 2m - to end the game strongly.

However ayheng intervened by upgrading one of his Austria bond to take over control of Austria. I could still end the game with Italy but for mistake #2 which was to leave a sizeable Austrian army that could harm Italy which ayheng ruthlessly used to suppressed the Italian factories.

Hence I could still get to Taxation for Italy but would not have enough tax points to end the game. Italian bonds would still have stayed at 4x credits (as-it-was). :(

How did I like this No-Investor variant against the standard Investor card?
- I certainly agree with most of BGG that the No-Investor variant has to be the way this game is played. By not having to worry about the Investor Card coming to you before you can invest, it makes $$ much more important as you could potentially lose your country at any time. The entire game becomes a whole lot more dynamic.

ayheng's original report on this Imperial session is also available from his blog space
http://aikyong.com/2009/01/28/imperial-otk-9th-jan-09

CHINA MOON

While Imperialism was going on strongly at our table, the other table completed their Hey That's My Fish game and moved on to their next game - China Moon.

SuSupposedly a game for young children, but dun let those cute frogs fool you! This game is full of screwage factor as everyone attempt to get their frogs to grab, or steal those lotus flowers from you.

It's also a game that'll appeal easily to ladies (guys, take note)..... :P

However do not let those lovely smiles lure you into a relaxed state.... as shrapnel found out to his frustration as he has to get deep into AP (analysis-paralysis) mode in order to salvage his game after his froggies were given the chipmunk treatment by cmun, LOL

KING OF SIAM

Phuah's group arrived as we were finishing Imperial, and after a quick dinner they started a 3p King of Siam.

OTK ROUND 2 - LE HAVRE

As some of the R1 gamers called it a nite, Phuah's group continued with their 2nd game of King of Siam with shrapnel, while the Imperial gamers moved on to Le Havre. Later Stone Age, Ice Flow and a second game of Le Havre were also played.

Stay tuned for the 2nd part of this meetup report

For more photos of this gaming session, visit our Flickr set
For more gaming reports, visit our Boardgame Meetup Reports Blog. To discuss this gaming session, visit our forum in BoardgameCafe.net

To buy the games played in this meetup, visit our Web Store. We carry over 300+ games and provide prompt delivery to anywhere in Malaysia

Fri 2/1/09 BGC Meetup at OTK Cheras - Dominion & Le Havre

jack208 — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 06:18:00 GMT

Gamers: Alvin (keealvin), Wei Yii (weiyii), Ken (wolfx), Allen (blownfreaks), Cliff (cliff), Heng (ayheng), Aw (aw) and Jeff Au (jack208); and special mention to Wai Yan (waiyan), Isabel and Yee Ling (crabzai) who dropped by to chit-chat only. :P

Games: Imperial, Cash-n-Guns, Dominion and Le Havre

Location: Old Town Kopitiam Cheras (Boardgamecafe.net) Location Map (wikimapia)
Date/Time: 2 January '09 (Fri) 8.00 PM - 4.30 AM

KL BOARDGAMES MEETUP REPORT @ OLD TOWN KOPITIAM CHERAS 2/1/09 - Part 2
by jack208

JAN2 MEETUP R2

This is the 2nd part of my report for BGC's 1st 2009 meetup held at OTK. You can read about the 1st part of the meetup report which talked about Imperial and Cash-n-Guns.

DOMINION

Since some wanted to learn the game of Dominion, we decided to pull this onto the table for the next game before we start on the heavy Le Havre.

blownfreaks did the teaching and soon a brisk 4p Dominion was in play between keealvin, weiyii, aw and wolfx. I did listen to the briefing as blownfreaks go thru the instruction and while I did not play, I was looking into aw's hand.

We played using the standard deck set up

There have been lots of discussion about whether Race for the Galaxy or this is the better game. After having played Race and seen a full game of Dominion in action, frankly I can't understand what's the fuss? :P

Firstly both are very different games. Why are we comparing them? It's like asking if Puerto Rico or Memoir 44 is the better game; the answer obviously depends on which crowd you are asking.

In Dominion, you attempt to form a "powerful" hand from the cards above which you can purchase

Race for the Galaxy is a point-accumulation game where you compete with the other players to draft cards from the deck hoping to get those that'll form winning combos with your strategy. The various roles you can do lend some theme to the game but essentially, the game of Race is about cycling thru the deck as fast as you can, looking for the cards that you want and hoping you get them (hence it's title Race).

Dominion is about hand management. You still need to build your "engine" so that you can draw/play more cards efficiently to maximize your hand.. but essentially it's about knowing which combos to buy into your hand and managing them as well as you can.

The only similarity I can see is that both of them uses lots of cards!

I do however think Dominion has more player interaction than Race. In Race, once you've decided on a strategy, you just want to run thru the deck to "look" for the cards you need. What the other players do or dun do, won't matter so much to you. Yeah, there are some occasions when you may need to change your game plan when you see a card you want being played by another player.. but in terms of interaction, it's pretty solitaire. :P

In Dominion, there are some interactions but minimal. Some cards - Military, Witch - affect other players. More importantly, in Dominion all cards are available openly and in limited quantities. So if you want the Village, you can actually get it first (unlike Race where if you wanted a certain card, you still have to cycle thru the deck and *hope* you can draw it). In this aspect, I like Dominion more than Race.

Both games are about maximizing your own hands rather than playing against the others. You want interaction? Try Imperial... hehehe.

You might ask, if there's always a set of 10 power cards (with various abilities) to start with in Dominion, wouldn't this affect replayability once you understood how to combo the 10 cards. Yes and no.

Yes, in that if you know what's the best combo from the 10 sets, this game might veer towards the auto-pilot mode. But however there are only 10 cards for each set.. and what's to say your other players do not know the same thing about the "best combo" as you do.

If they do, then wouldn't they go for the same combos as you are.. therefore rendering your "masterplan" useless and you then better have a Plan B, which needs to be better than the others' Plan B.

Secondly, I understand the game comes with 500+ cards hence you do not need to play with the standard 10 cards. Mix-n-match and the game then becomes one where the person who can figure out the best combo in the shortest time wins. Sounds like a game to me. :)

My rating on this game? It's fast and fairly fun card game. It's also one where the "luck" element is lesser than RftG, and you have more control over your gameplan.

Will certainly play.. but not more than 2x per session/nite/week/month. hehe. Not sure about owning it... unless it's to make my Top 10 Games library complete (as this game now sits at #6)

And while we are at the Top Ten, the only other game in the BGG Top Ten that I do not have yet is Race of the Galaxy, which now sits at #10. If it drops one rank to #11 then this point becomes moot. hehe

To me, this is like San Juan (which I do have a copy, and which I do play once every blue moon). I'll always prefer to play Puerto Rico than San Juan.. but once in a while, bring it (San Juan) on. :)

LE HAVRE

With wolfx around, we certainly cannot end the evening without playing Le Havre especially since the only English version of the game in Msia now is seen at OTK Cheras only. :P

From the same designer as Agricola, Uwe (designer) seems to deliver Le Havre to satisfy the cravings of his Agricola fans who demanded less card-based roles (Occupation and Minor Improvements) and more luck-free options (ala Caylus); yet retaining some form of randomness.

IMHO I'd say Uwe delivered!

Let me quickly summarize the game we did in this meetup; a 5p game with blownfreaks, cliff, wolfx, aw and jack208. cliff playing for the 1st time picked up the game pretty fast and soon he was turning his resources into building VPs quickly. Similarly aw (also his first time) was doing not too badly.

(From left) blownfreaks, cliff and aw looking at their options in Le Havre

wolfx as usual kept asking others to move along, play your game, dun AP (analysis-paralysis) but when it came to his turn, his brain shuts down temporarily while he APed on his moves!! LOL But he did get 2nd place.

blownfreaks was going for the Building strategyand he snapped up (I think) all the three bonus buildings which gave him about 32+ pts in bonus to win the game!!

Commented by blownfreaks
Great report yet again. Well I need to clarify something, I have indeed a 'plan in mind', that is to build the most cost effective building to win the game. Not as mentioned in the report as 'blownfreaks was doing this and that and neither that'... :)

I think one of the good building that is seldom used by the players other than the owner is the 'Construction' (Use to build one/two buildings). I think I have used this building 4 times in the game and managed to build 8 buildings. Basically I have saved 4 steps in the process of doing so. I have also been eying the bonus building during the last few rounds in the games and buying the cheap buildings to maximize the bonus.

There is some sort of strategy there... just give me some credit will ya... haha

I was trying for the cattle strategy... getting hoards of them cows.. and lots of grain... but couldn't figure an efficient way to convert them to good money (which is essentially VP in this game). Got a crappy 115 pts (which is low in a 5p game where we reckon a good score is around 140-160 pts).

There are 30 standard buildings that'll always be available. However the random element introduced here is by sorting these 30 buildings into three stacks of tens. They are arranged in order of appearance by their "sort number" which basically keeps the stronger buildings towards the end of the game.

However their stacking order which is different from game-to-game may affect slightly the player's strategy for each game (but dun think we have reached that level of experience yet for it to matter).

Lots of playing pieces for this game... you need a large table to play Le Havre!

We decided to call it a nite after the mentally draining Le Havre. I reckon Le Havre will come to the table at OTK Cheras again next week since I promised wolfx that I'll write the 1st full session report on Le Havre (from Msia) - hi wolfx! - so stay tuned for next week's report where we intend to do Imperial Non-investor and either Le Havre or Agricola.

For more photos of this gaming session, visit our Flickr set
For more gaming reports, visit our Boardgame Meetup Reports Blog.
To discuss this gaming session, visit our forum in BoardgameCafe.net

To buy the games played in this meetup, visit our Web Store. We carry over 300+ games and provide prompt delivery to anywhere in Malaysia.

Fri 2/1/09 BGC Meetup at OTK Cheras - Imperial, Cash & Guns, Dominion and Le Havre

jack208 — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 07:06:00 GMT

Games: Imperial, Cash-n-Guns, Dominion and Le Havre

Location: Old Town Kopitiam Cheras (Boardgamecafe.net) Location Map (wikimapia)
Date/Time: 2 January '09 (Fri) 8.00 PM - 4.30 AM

KL BOARDGAMES MEETUP REPORT @ OLD TOWN KOPITIAM CHERAS 2/1/09
by jack208

JAN2 MEETUP R1

It has been a while since I write meetup reports... Well, we do post quick updates via the OTK thread but it's not the same somehow as writing a full-fledge report. Now that I'm starting to move our photo gallery to Flickr, let's get back into the report writing as well.

Here's to another GREAT YEAR OF BOARDGAMING!

IMPERIAL

Imperial - just how do you start to describe this game? A game that combines an economic engine with military actions? One that fans of Axis & Allies may love - after all, what's the objective of war? To control and manipulate so that you reap the riches of the countries you conquered... no?

A game that those who like 18xx games but find that it's not confrontational enough would luv to jump in... forget about sending incompetent engineers to mess up your rival's railway network... here in Imperial, you can just send your armies to invade and suppress your opponent's factory!! buahahahaa......

We haven't bring this to the table for some time... and since I heard it's name mentioned twice; once when blownfreaks asked if we can do Imperial (he probably came across it while browsing BGG after we did Hamburgum, the 3rd game in the Rondel series), and the second time when our Imperial Lord (aka aanemesis) said he's coming to OTK tonight and would luv to re-visit some old flames (ie Imperial). This was before MH233 took off from Putrajaya Airport.

ayheng recapping some pointers on the game as keealvin, weiyii, cliff and blownfreaks paid full attention

As there were some newbies to Imperial, we recap the rules for them and then promptly set up the board and draw for starting bond distribution. We played with the standard Investor mode (yes, potential newspaper-reading time hehe).

jack208 starting with Russia and having some interest in the welfare of France (controlled by blownfreaks)

I drew majority control in Russia ($9m) which comes with minority stake in France ($4m). The smaller number below the bond value is the potential dividend that you'll receive if that country pays out ("Investor" action). The interesting thing about Imperial bonds is that the lower value bonds have higher ROI ie. the 4m France bond gives me a ROI of 50% while the 9m Russia bond only gets 44%.

ayheng drew Austria (minority: Germany) so he'll start the game, while wolfx got England (minority: Russia), keealvin/weiyii got Italy (minority: England), cliff ran Germany (minority: Italy), and blownfreaks had France (minority: Austria)

England (red) starting with two naval factories (blue) which would grant it the naval superpower status

wolfx was commenting on England's options before the draw.. and well, he drew England so this means he'd full opportunity to try out his strategy (or not). England starts with two naval factories which is true to its nature as a naval force. The rest tend to be more balanced starting with an army and naval factory each.

Looked like Factory action's the most popular... England building an army factory to complement it's two naval bases.

This session started with Austria doing Factory then Production and everyone following suit. Hmm... groupthink at its zenith?

Anyhow England was smart to build an army factory and the rest all expanding to either army or navy depending on their expansion plans. Russia opted for an army factory in Kiev in order to expand south.

The Rondel that lets each player choose their action! There are now four Rondel games - Antike, Imperial, Hamburgum and (latest) The Princes of Machu Pichu.

Unfortunately Austria (ayheng) was also thinking the same thing.. and her armies started capturing neutral cities south of her borders with her naval forces entering the Ionian Sea, and soon the Russian forces clashed with the Austrian in Romania and Bulgaria.....

In the east, Russia (purple) and Austria (yellow) were fighting over Bulgaria and Romania while Italy (green) silently built her forces

Westward, England started her expansion once she has trained up sufficient armies.... and when England expands, that will either go into Germany or French territories. In this game, England went for France, and she went for the throat and landed her elite forces to take Paris and Holland.

England drew first blood by successfully landing her armies into Paris and suppressed France's economic growth

Note: In such scenario, Russia (jack208) needs to switch her attention northwards to check Germany's growth since a Germany unimpeded by England or France will expand rapidly into the Ultras! However the ongoing war with Austria south of Russia kept me pre-occupied there.

Germany's dream scenario.... England vs France and Russia vs Austria allowed her to grow unimpeded. Note that England (red) and Austria (yellow) were the first countries to tax.

France were slowly reclaiming back lost ground - with some help from Germany - as she pushed back against the English (see below). France's successful control of the English Channel and Germany's powerful naval presence in the North Sea kept England pegged back.

The English then cranked up their ship production in an attempt to push out against the French and Germans on both sea fronts.... all parties gearing up for a fierce naval battle!

Italy (keealvin) - which has been building quietly - launched a quick raid when her armies went eastward and attacked Austria from the back while she's engaged on the Eastern front with Russia. The Italian forces were swift, merciless and quickly cut-off Austria's main naval forces from its mainland leaving it stranded in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.

Italy's (green) attack left the Austria (yellow) fleet stranded in the Mediterranean Sea

Italy's conquest of North Africa was left uncontested by a France who's occupied on her northern shores (with England).

keealvin's strategy worked well as Italy's first taxation yielded 14m and keealvin received a bonus of 9m for his good work! Most of us were taxing at around the 10m mark (with personal bonus to the President of around 3-5m) with the exception of wolfx who were true to his unethical nature delivered about 4m of net tax for England while he himself pocketed 5m bonus!! <grin>

By now, it's too late for Russia to switch it's war to the northern Front as Germany (black) had then grew very strongly controlling both the Baltic & North Sea; while England and France were engaged bitterly over the English Channel.

Being shrewd investor, ayheng then quietly shift from warfare and started picking up stocks in Germany as by this time, Germany were leading the ROI chart with her bonds being worth x3 on the Yield Factor! Me on the other hand were busy taxing and paying out dividends from Russia's treasury.... and slowly investing into Italy.

jack208 expanding his portfolio to include Italian (green) bonds

Italy after having had Austria on its backfoot, then did something .. unexpected. Instead of going for France whose back's were exposed, she wanted to negotiate a pact with the French Government to use the Bay of Biscay to attack England? This is baffling as keealvin has a rather significant minority stake in England.

England (wolfx) ponders while her minority stakeholders keealvin and weiyii planned their next conquests

But on the other hand, this is a typical oversight made by most ppl new to this game. They take this as a "wargame" and set about using their starting countries to conquer others. keealvin did make an interesting observation at the end of the game - that there's a distinctive absence of the players going for aggressive take-over of another's country by buying up bonds (compared to the last session where aanemesis was playing)!

There was an attempted buy-out by cliff (Germany) on Italy during mid-game, but that was quickly rebuffed by keealvin upgrading one of his Italian bonds and regained control. After that, no one attempted another take-over.

After almost drying up Russia, I made a grab for a high $20m Italy bond towards the end (taking my Italian investment to $26m) when I see Italy can make her home-run (which she did) but my 26m is still way short of taking over keealvin's 29m stake.

The objective of this game is to have the most of the high-yield bonds at the end of the game; "high yield" being defined as bonds from countries that are doing well on the economic front (ie. they managed to raise lots of tax!) which is measured by the bond's credit score.

Germany (black) running up the Bond Credit score track. Countries that are high on this track provide higher yield.

Military expansion obviously helps to increase your tax yield.. but having ONLY shares in one country won't necessarily win you the game coz the rest can easily see your country is winning and start buying up bonds in your country, therefore closing the financial gap with you.

Italy (green) and Germany (black) were the two strongest nations in this session, and that's accurately reflected in their high Tax position (in the chart at top left of picture)

A high taxation (and investment return) doesn't necessarily win you the game; it only helps make your country more attractive to bond raiders (like aanemesis if he's playing) who will snap up bonds in your country. You'll then need to be able to have the cash to defend your position. :)

Game position almost at end of game

Italy ended the game by reaching the 25 credit score on her last taxation (just after Russia did hers to push her bonds to x4). Italian bonds now yielded x5 value while Germany and Russia were at x4.

cliff (Germany) - as expected - won the game with ~158m while jack208 (Russia) has ~148m and keealvin (Italy) ~138m. An unchecked Germany is simply too strong. But my 20m investment into Italy allowed me to leapfrogged keealvin into 2nd, which serves to underline the economic objective of this game (vs the military focus).

I also suspected - and aanemesis can confirm this for us - that the difficulty in timing the take-over is also due to the fact we played using the Investor card and even if we've the money, we dun get to invest (ie buy new bond) until the card comes around to us.

We've been talking about playing the non-Investor card variant but have not gotten around to doing so. One of the reasons obviously is that if there are newcomers to Imperial, we shud play with the Investor card to familiarize them with the game. But hey, since this group of 6 now already knew the game - so next game, no Investor card? ;)

You can discuss Imperial strategies here.

CASH & GUNS

After Imperial, keealvin suggested Cash & Guns... yeah good fun game that doesn't need to do much thinking.

keealvin quickly walked us thru the rules, and after selecting our character, off we go for glory and money! In the end, wolfx won this hands-down.

Wolfx, the eventual winner for this session of Cash & Guns

R2 report coming next; Dominion (so what do I think of this game?) and Le Havre with 5 players. Stay tuned for the 2nd Part of this meetup report.

For more photos of this gaming session, visit our Flickr set
For more gaming reports, visit our Boardgame Meetup Reports Blog.
To discuss this gaming session, visit our forum in BoardgameCafe.net

To buy the games played in this meetup, visit our Web Store. We carry over 300+ games and provide prompt delivery to anywhere in Malaysia.

Fri Meetup at OTK and Boardgamecafe.net 21/9/07 - Zombies, Age of Empires III, Age of Steam, 1856

jack208 — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 08:02:00 GMT

Gamers: Jorge (patomas), Ian (shrapnel), Donovan (don), Heng (ayheng), Henry (rhyen), Alan Tan (alantan), Steven Yap (stevenyap) and Jeff Au (jack208)

Games: Zombies, Age of Empires III, Age of Steam, 1856

Location: Old Town Kopitiam & Boardgamecafe.net, Cheras
Date/Time: 21 September 07 (Fri) 8.00 PM - 6.30 AM

KL BOARDGAMES MEETUP REPORT @ OLD TOWN KOPITIAM & BOARDGAMECAFE.NET CHERAS 21/9/07
by jack208

FRIDAY MEETUP ROUND 1 @ OLD TOWN KOPITIAM CHERAS

Another week another meetup. This week we've shrapnel to thank for bringing his nephew Donovan's Zombies game (from Twilight Creations). I'd wanted to testdrive the game to see if it's suitable for us to play during the upcoming Halloween Party at Outpost Cafe.

Zombies

Alan Tan, shrapnel, Don and rhyen starting the Zombies game

In Zombies, you play one of five people stuck in a town full of zombies. You start in the town square and your objective is to get to the helipad. To make things interesting for you, the helipad has zombies packed like sardines!

Your objective: Get here and fly away! But you may have to ask those zombies nicely....

Along the way, you can pick up weapons (skateboard, shotgun and chainsaw!) that allows you to hack them zombies more and faster! You can also pick up more bullet and life-point token. These are useful if you wanna survive longer than your comrades.

The Zombies are moved by the active player at the end of his turn.. obviously he's going to move some zombies your way! There's one variant where if a zombie has line of sight to any human, it runs towards that person (ie twice its movement point). Now this will induce more stress... hehehe

Players starting in the middle of the board ie town square.

Commentary from rhyen
Zombies (Jeff, Alan Tan, Sharpel and newphew, and me) - sharpel won after we cleared all the zombies and he was first to run to the helipad.

Verdict? Yup.. certainly a good game to bring to the Halloween table this Oct27! Oh Don's copy is the 1st Edition and thus does not include the female zombies.

Age of Empires III

Heng arrived while we've started the Zombies game, and were joined later by Jorge and Steven. Since the five of us were busy hacking the limbs of zombies..... he decided to do (wat else?) teach Steven and Jorge the joy of discoveries in Age of Empires III.

ayheng (back to camera) teaching Steven and Jorge AOEIII

There is some interesting chatter going on in the Boardgamecafe forum about AOE3. Some seems to hate the game, some indifferent and a few gave their thumbs-up. My take is that this is a good game (7/10) but a game which you need to play a few things in order to learn its nuances (especially its capital buildings) before you can play better.

You don't believe me? In the game above, ayheng stockpiled thousands of spanish coins to thrashed his newbie opponents!

Look at the amount of coins ayheng has stockpiled! Big bully!!!

Commentary from rhyen
Age of Empires III - Heng introed Steven and Jorge to AOE3 (that becursed games :P), I presume that by now, Jeff Au has uploaded Hengy's demolition of the field and his stacks of gold doubloons.

Age of Steam (Rust Belt map)

Finally, a game that we've enjoyed in the past but strangely has not been hitting the gaming table recently... Age of Steam. Since this was our first game of Age of Steam in many many months and there were also some gamers here who were learning this game for the 1st time, we decided to start with the basic map.

6-player Age of Steam on the standard Rust Belt map

shrapnel, don, jorge and steven were learning this game for the 1st time.. and I think they enjoyed it! Look at their Happy Faces!! Now to take out the North Carolina map for them, hehe

The four AOS newbies - shrapnel/don, jorge and steven enjoying the Rust Belt map

Commentary from rhyen
We then did 6 player AOS where Jorge went out and got back into the game (by taking over from team sharpel/nephew, both of whom had to leave early). Hengy pipped Steven into second after Steven got distracted by Jeff Au trying to interrupt my hint to him to urbanized one of their town into a city. I tied with Jeff Au for 3rd, no idea about the tiebreaker, after some help from Jorge that padded my score with runs along my track.

FRIDAY MEETUP ROUND 2 @ BOARDGAMECAFE.NET

While shrapnel and don have to leave, we still have 5 players for R2. Since everyone's still high on train and steam engines, we decided to do 1856 - another old fave that has been missing from our table for a while... another 2 more gamers graduating from the BGC 18xx academy.

Here's rhyen's report on the session
We retired to RD2 in BGC where 1856 returned to the table. Quick instructions and hints to Jorge and Steven and we were off. Seating arrangement was Hengy, Steven, Jeff, Jorge and finally me.

Many gamers were trying to ride on the coattails of Jedi Council Member Jeff Au early on, capitalizing his LPS early on. but investor Hengy wised up to the potential of my CPR and duly invested as much money as possible thus allowing me to reward him with the first $22 EPS per share in the early part of the 3rd phase while everyone else was stuggling in the low teens. We both sapu-ed all 10 shares of CPR and my $20+ EPS kept him happy all the while.

Later on, I helped Steven defend his GW from being taken over by Hengy by buying the last share splitting it in a 3-way tie between me, Hengy and Steven (Jorge held the last share, perhaps Hengy could persuade him to sell since either me or hengy would be the first one to snap it up and take over Steven's lonely company). The favor was repaid by Hengy dumping all of his GW shares onto the market (to jumpstart CV) while Steven had to struggle to capitalized his new company WGB after setting a par value too low (perhaps being fooled by Jeff Au's opening par value of $70 for GT, a company that Jeff Au intended to merged into the CGR by taking on govt loans after govt loan). Immediately sizing up the prospect, Jeff Au started egging on Steven to Hot Sun me but Steven repaid my favour by heroically salvaging both companies from the throes of tight cashflows (and managed to buy the last 2 '5' trains).

Thus setting the grand finale for Jeff Au to buy the first 6 with GT (which fell into CGR), and then proceeding to upgrade his LPS '4' into a diesel rusting everyone else's train except for both of Steven's '5's. But dawn was breaking and Jorge's ride was waiting and Steven needed to crash so Jeff Au wins by consensus (Let's face it, how do you beat a LPS that has a 'D' and '5' and a CGR with '6'; guess we will never know unless Hengy and I managed to dabble in our stockmarket manipulation).

PS: Also noted, many of us misplayed a few rules, with Jeff Au actually overcapitalizing his GT with funds from investors that were supposed to be held in escrow until he actually destinated but sadly he forgot all about that until someone pointed it out.

Jeff Au and I then proceed to delay Hengy's return to Klang by talking about the caylus PLE competition and Hengy got so hungry that he joined us for dimsum breakfast. YAY! we finally managed to get Hengy to experience the real 8 AM syndrome. We talked on and on and on about possible moves, computer simulation programs, game annotations; we even found out that only I like chicken feet and jeff doesn't like prawns. Managed to sample the original gyoza, aka wo teap aka, fried leftover sui jiao.

Click here for more photos of this gaming session.
For more gaming reports, visit our Boardgame Meetup Reports Blog.
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21-09-2007

Fri Meetup at OTK and Boardgamecafe.net 14/9/07 - Ticket to Ride, Lifeboats, Caylus, Pompeji, 18Scan, Powergrid, Manila and Die Handler

jack208 — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 07:40:00 GMT

Gamers: Jorge (patomas), Edel, Ian (shrapnel), Ken (wolfx), Henry (rhyen), Cheryl (c_mun), Siew Hui, Yee Ling, Dylan, Imran (redtag), Wai Yan (waiyan) and Jeff Au (jack208)

Games: Ticket to Ride, LifeBoats, Caylus, The Downfall of Pompeii, 18Scan, Colloseum, Power Grid, Manila, Die Handler

Location: Old Town Kopitiam & Boardgamecafe.net, Cheras
Date/Time: 14 September 07 (Fri) 8.00 PM - 6.30 AM

KL BOARDGAMES MEETUP REPORT @ OLD TOWN KOPITIAM & BOARDGAMECAFE.NET CHERAS 14/9/07
by jack208

A QUIETER MEETUP

After the rousing meetup last week (7/9/07) where we also hosted one of the Catan Qualifier Legs, we are back to a more quiet meetup week especially since a few of the OTK regulars could not make it due to other commitments.

We still managed to squeeze in a good range of games from the old classic Ticket to Ride to faves like Powergrid, new games as in Lifeboats and an OOP game in Die Handler.

FRIDAY MEETUP ROUND 1 @ OLD TOWN KOPITIAM CHERAS

Jorge and his wife Edel were the first to arrive to OTK. Ian (aka Shrapnel) joined him and together with Waiyan, they started one of the old classic, Alan Moon's Ticket to Ride while waiting for the others to arrive.

Alan Moon's bestselling game for 4p: Waiyan, Ian, Edel & Jorge

The remaining three - Wolfx, Henry and myself - started a quick game of Caylus on another table.

T3p Caylus between wolfx (in pic) henry & jack208.

Cheryl (c_mun) and Siew Hui were the next to arrive. They brought two other friends - Yee Ling & Dylan. After getting introduced to everyone (this was their first time to OTK Cheras) they settled down for a game of survivor ala LifeBoats.

Six new players for Lifeboats: waiyan, ian, cheryl, yee ling, dylan and jorge

The 3p Caylus game ended pretty quickly at our table and since wolfx has not experienced the joy of throwing meeples into volcanoes, we brought out The Downfall of Pompeii for him. Looking at the happy face on rhyen, this looks like a game he enjoys very much.

Time to chuck your fren's meeples in volcanoes.... aarrrgghhhh!

They were still Lifeboating when we completed our game of Pompeii. Redtag made a surprise impromptu appearance (he probably thinks we are playing TI3) and since the only 4p game we've were 18Scan, we decided it's time to introduce these two to the joy of 18xx.

rhyen was initially given the honor of doing the 18xx intro (via 18Scan) but halfway thru the game, the Lifeboats table finished theirs and shrapnel wanted to learn Colloseum.

rhyen, the 18xx teacher with new students redtag and wolfx on the Scandinavia map

FRIDAY MEETUP ROUND 2 @ BOARDGAMECAFE.NET

We concluded R1 at OTK with half-completed 18Scan and Colloseum. Some left but 5 gamers continued to BGC for Round 2.

Started off R2 with an old fave that has not been played for some time; Power Grid on the Germany map. The signs were indeed there that we haven't been playing this for some time as we forgot that with 5 players, we only play 5 areas - we played with all 6 areas hence the map felt "relaxed".

First Powergrid game for redtag

New Padawan trying out his jedi mind trick.... on the game components!

Manila (courtesy of wolfx) was next. This is a good filler game (though some games can take 1hr+) for 4-5 players, and since some have not played this, we decided to do this after Powergrid. Wolfx taught the game and off we go pushing our luck in Manila.

Jorge and Wolfx in a game of Manila.

Die Handler was next (and the last game for R2). This is one of my fave trading/bidding game where the objective is to climb the highest in the social status ladder. Money gets you there but money by itself does not win you the game.

The wooden wagon where you placed your trade goods to be shipped to another city to sell

In this game, each of us are traders... and we can buy any of the five types of goods, store them in warehouses (in any of the 6 cities) and later send them onto the wagons to other cities to sell them. From the sales proceeds (and hopefully not losses), we become rich and pay to get our social status updated.

Sounds reasonably simple yet the game is full of screwage almost in every round. It starts from the bidding to become the Wagon Master. The Wagon Master determines what goods can and cannot be loaded onto the wagon (before it rolls out to another city).. and at what price (yes, you gotta pay to have your goods loaded onto the wagon, and you pay the Wagon Master!)

Somewhat similar to Manila's bid for Harbor Master except in this case, you get to make money off the wagon loading and also control which types of goods are loaded onto the wagons. Usually if you have goods stored in the warehouse, you would want them loaded onto the wagon so that the goods can be sold.

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Mr Blue's not keeping up with the Joneses...

Strangely some players dun quite get the game. This game is a big fave of the Pudu Gamers too but I think some OTK regulars (aanemesis, ayheng) have played the game and were lukewarm to it.

wolfx is probably joining the Lukewarm Club as he gave up halfway thru the game and became Mr Randomizer (ala LostBoyz in the last Railroad Tycoon game at BGC). He literally took out his frustration via random bidding for wagon master!! LOL Anyway rhyen won this game after piping Jorge in the last turn.

R2 ended 630am; Jorge went home while three amigos (wolfx, rhyen and jack208) went for dimsum at Yulek. Not a bad session considering we got to play about 8-9 games.

Click here for more photos of this gaming session.
For more gaming reports, visit our Boardgame Meetup Reports Blog.
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To buy the games played in this meetup, visit our Web Store. We carry over 200+ games and provide prompt delivery to anywhere in Malaysia.

14-09-2007

Fri Meetup & Catan Qualifier at OTK/Boardgamecafe.net 7/9/07 - Settlers of Catan, Manila, Modern Art, Caylus, Havoc, Saboteur, Bang!

jack208 — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 09:04:00 GMT

Catan Qualifiers: Karan Dhillon, Steven Yap, Jorge, Phuah, Dominic, Kah May, Bi Lin, and Wai Yan
Other Gamers: Long (lostboyz), Ken (wolfx), Chris Yap (chrisyap), Daniel Tan (randomhit), Ian (Shrapnel) with two frens, and Jeff Au (jack208)

Games: Settlers of Catan, Manila, Caylus, Havoc, Saboteur, Bang! with Dodge City, Modern Art

Location: Old Town Kopitiam & Boardgamecafe.net, Cheras
Date/Time: 7 September 07 (Fri) 8.00 PM - 6.30 AM

KL BOARDGAMES MEETUP & SETTLERS OF CATAN QUALIFIER REPORT @ OLD TOWN KOPITIAM & BOARDGAMECAFE.NET CHERAS 8/7/07
by jack208

A ROUSING MEETUP AT OTK/BGC

Usual Friday.. usual Boardgames Meetup at OTK (Old Town Kopitiam) Cheras for R1 (round 1). I've to admit I've been occupied with another "council" (ie. work) lately and therefore have not been writing any meetup reports. Hope to get back to my weekly routine of posting updates here....

Let's begin with last Friday's Meetup which was attended by the largest crowd so far at OTK with 16 gamers dropping by and in spite of 3-4 regulars not being able to attend due to various other commitment. Last Friday also happened to be the Settlers of Catan M'sia Qualifier at OTK.

Last year, two of our (M'sia) best Catan players - Ryan and Kok Keong - were sent to Essen to represent Malaysia in the Settlers of Catan World Championship. They came back and said the experience of taking part in the World Championship was an immense experience.

This year's Catan Qualifier (sponsored by Imagine Games) started at the Asia Gaming Zone event in July 07 and it went to Toybox, Mage Cafe, Outpost, GACC (the 1st qualifier outside KL) and last Friday, it was Boardgamecafe.net's turn to host the last open qualifier at Old Town Kopitiam Cheras.

SETTLERS OF CATAN QUALIFIER @ OTK CHERAS

So far, 12 players have already qualified for the Catan Malaysia Finals (to be held tentatively Sep 22) - Ryan & Kok Keong (last year's finalists), Rob Street & Henry (Asia Game Zone), Kai & Joshua (Mage), Vincent & Foo (Toybox), Mohd Amran & Sujatha (GACC) and Daniel & Tracy (Outpost).

There are 4 more places left with 2 seats coming from Boardgamecafe.net and another 2 from a closed Qualifier for last year's 14 finalists (read the Settlers of Catan M'sia Finals report for the full list of the 16 finalists).

Two of the players having a warm-up session with their friends before the Qualifier starts.

Once all the 8 registered players turned up, we started the table-draw and divide the players into two groups of four; occupying both the coffee table sofa sets in OTK Cheras.

Table 1 consists of Steven Yap, Phuah, Kah May and Dominic. Steven raced to an early lead and never looked back. Kah May who managed to get 6 pts - when Steven ended the game - took 2nd place for the Final Round.

Table 1 (from left): Phuah, Kah May, Dominic and Steven

Table 2 was made up by Karan, Wai Yan, Bi Lin and Jorge. That game was quite evenly matched in the beginning until Karan made the breakthrough. He quickly established his 10th VP to win the game with Jorge coming in 2nd at 7 VP.

Table 2 (from left): Jorge, Karan, Wai Yan and Bi Lin

Steven, Kah May, Karan and Jorge took a short break before coming back to the OTK coffee table for the Final Round of today's qualifier; with the top 2 winners going to compete in the Settlers of Catan M'sian Finals 2007 for the right to represent Malaysia in the Catan World Championship in Essen, Germany.

The gameboard for the Final Round

Player turn order - Steven, Kah May, Jorge and Karan. With the desert hex being right in the middle of the board, the players took some turn analyzing the board to decide on their starting positions for the settlements.

The Final Round starting with Steven (in white on right), Kah May, Jorge and Karan

Mid-game position for the Final Round. Kah May had an early lead but the others were very close behind.

Jorge (on right) looking pensively at the board. He's the eventual winner for this Qualifier.

Almost end-game position for the Final Round

I would like to thank all the 8 participating players for taking part in this qualifier. To those who did not succeed to enter the M'sian Finals this year, I wish them better luck (and more practice) for next year. To the two qualifiers from OTK - Jorge and Karan - I wish them all the best in the upcoming Msian Settlers Finals.

Thanks to OTK for allowing us to host the qualifiers there, and to Imagine Games for sponsoring the eventual prizes.

Dominic	Steven Yap	Phuah	Kah May
Karan Dhillon	Jorge (Patomas)	Bi Lin	Wai Yan

FRIDAY MEETUP ROUND 1 @ OLD TOWN KOPITIAM CHERAS

Beside the eight Catan Qualifier players, we also have LostBoyz and Wolfx hanging around giving moral support or otherwise known in gaming terms as K.P.C. (kay poh chee).

Two of the Terasek Gamers decide to make a special appearance - after a long hiatus from the (face-2-face) boardgaming scene. The two are Chris Yap (aka BSW Caylus sifu) and Daniel Tan (randomhit).

Chris Yap, Daniel, LostBoyz and Wolfx playing Manila

The five of us non-Catan players were about to start a game of Manila with Wolfx running thru the rules for us. In the end I could not join their game as I've to attend to the Catan Final Round but the four who did play, enjoyed the game tremendously.

The wooden punts in Manila. Nice game bits.

Manila is what you would term as a push-your-luck type of game where you attempt to make the most money (Pesos) by whatever means possible; legal or otherwise... A light filler that plays under 1 hour; it's a game that I feel many would luv to play!

Note: There was a misconception that Manila is a broken game due to a misplayed rule that allowed the Harbor Master to buy unlimited shares (of ware)! However if played correctly, it is definitely not broken... Refer here for the misplayed rule clarification.

The usual Friday crowd streaming into OTK as we continue to play on....

Those Catan players who did not get into the Final Round then decided to have another round of friendly Settlers of Catan. ah... the magic of Catan!

More trading in Catan

After their game of Manila, I joined the Terasek/Wolfx group and we did one of Knizia's finest and arguably the best pure auction game, Modern Art. The Terasek Gamers were bemused in the beginning as they began to comprehend how to evaluate the "value" of the painting that's being auctioned.

Terasek Gamers Chris and Daniel figuring out how to put a value to the paintings put up for auction in Modern Art

Meanwhile another occasional OTK gamer, Ian (shrapnel) dropped in with two of his lady friends... and guess what he brought along as a gateway game? Yes - Settlers of Catan!! Boy.. I think we are having too much of Catan on one night!

Ian (shrapnel) playing Settlers of Catan with two of his friends over at the other table

The Catan Qualifier concluded with Jorge and Karan taking the top 2 seats (congrats!) but it was a close finish. Guess what they did after stressing out over two rounds of competitive Catan? You would expect them to play a filler for eg Coloretto, yes?

Jorge showing some Younglings the art of jousting in Caylus.

But they started a game of Caylus! Some of them have not played Caylus before so Jorge volunteered to be the jousting instructor in the absence of our resident jousting Jedi Knights ayheng or aanemesis. It is rumoured aanemesis went south to search for the mythical dragonlance... while ayheng was busy preparing to hand-over his trusted lightsaber (vanilla Caylus) to padawan Wolfx.

Meanwhile after our table (Terasek/Woflx) finished our game of Modern Art, we decided to do another OTK favorite - 5p Havoc, the poker-like card game based on the 100-Year War.

FRIDAY MEETUP ROUND 2 @ BOARDGAMECAFE.NET

OTK's Round 1 soon came to a close... and as usual, those-who-can adjourned to Boardgamecafe.net for R2 (round 2). Initially I thought we've a group of 10 for R2 and was excitedly talking up Werewolf (Lupus in Tabula) to the Terasek Gamers. Alas, I found out later that Phuah and Dominic have to take their leave....

Note: If only some of our regulars were present - ayheng, rhyen, aanemesis, vincent; we could have a 15p Werewolf!

So that left us with 8 players. Two or three short to do a good Werewolf session, but two extra to do 6p Power Grid (or 1856, hehe). We finally settled on party-fun-card games.... and Saboteur hit the table. Wolfx did the rule explanation and soon we were digging and mining our way thru to the gold mine!

Wolfx teaching Saboteurs

In the 1st round, halfway thru Lostboyz started acting like a saboteur. Very soon, he was hit with broken equipments from some concerned miners which drew the assistance from another would-be saboteur.

The broken equipments kept coming out.. and soon we have the 3rd saboteur.. and then the 4th saboteur?? Cannot be ma.. coz even in a 8p Saboteur there can be at most 3 saboteurs only! Now we have 4 prime suspects!!!

Turned out Lostboyz misunderstood the game to be "competitive" for the miners and halfway thru the round decided to "sabo" his own miner friends.... causing the other saboteurs to be confused as well! LOL

Wolfx showing how to draw a gun (er... card) quickly in Bang Dodge City

Bang! was next to the table. With 8 players, we put in the Dodge City expansion ie we have one Sheriff, two Deputies, three Outlaws and two Renegades. The two Renegades will initially be helping out each other until they are able to confront the Sheriff for a one-on-one in which case, the renegades then need to turn on each other to decide who's the eventual winner.

Wolfx as Vulture Sam demonstrated the art of the quick draw... but that didn't seem to help him as he was quickly knocked out in the 2nd round!

Finally time for some to call it a nite around 430am. There four of us left, and an hour and a half to 6am. So the four of us continued with another round of Modern Art. Was so tempted to open 18Scan!

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Pssst.... did you see 1856 somewhere in the picture above??? :P

We finally say sayonara around 630am. It has been a great nite of gaming at OTK/BGC for gaming (and also the Catan Qualifier).

Besides the absent regulars, the other missing gamers tonight were the Pudu Gamers, who initially were supposed to come for the Catan Qualifier but could not make it last minute. If they came, it would be an even greater gaming nite at OTK!

p/s The icing on the cake would be if we'd brought 18xx to the table for R2. The bright news is that some of the gamers in tonite's session are very keen to try 18xx. So perhaps we'll get to see two 18xx games going on at the same time at OTK/BGC one fine day.

Click here for more photos of this gaming session.
For more gaming reports, visit our Boardgame Meetup Reports Blog.
To discuss this gaming session, visit our forum in BoardgameCafe.net

If you wish to join our boardgame meetups, check out our Meetup Calendar and sign up now at KL Boardgames Meetup!

To buy the games played in this meetup, visit our Web Store. We carry over 200+ games and provide prompt delivery to anywhere in Malaysia.

Fri Meetup at Boardgamecafe.net 8/6/07 - Formula De, Wallenstein, Pompeji

jack208 — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 09:40:00 GMT

Gamers: Heng (ayheng), Long (lostboyz), Lai Wah (laiwah) and Jeff Au (jack208)

Games: Formula De, Wallenstein, The Downfall of Pompeii

Location: Boardgamecafe.net, Cheras
Date/Time: 8 June 07 (Fri) 9.30 PM - 4.00 AM

KL BOARDGAMES MEETUP REPORT @ BOARDGAMECAFE.NET CHERAS 8/7/07
by ayheng & jack208

PRELUDE: YUMCHA @ OLD TOWN KOPITIAM
reported by jack208

It's our usual Friday Meetup at the Cheras area which we've been doing regularly for the past few months just that I've been busy and haven't been diligently updating this blog with meetup reports and photos.

We started off with yum-cha and chit-chat session at Old Town Kopitiam. I was there having dinner with another buddy of mine (Koh) to do some catching up. OTK's White Coffee is always a good companion to chit-chat with.

LostBoyz was the first gamer to drop in.... looking a bit lost (hehe) as he was scouting OTK 1st Floor looking for signs of any gaming activities. He joined us and chit-chat while having his curry chicken rice dinner.

Koh left, Heng arrived. Dinner for Heng while we changed topics to (what else) boardgames.... Surprisingly when Koh was around, we were actually talking about Xbox gaming; Xbox Live, Second Life, WOW all crept into the conversation.

Formula De
reported by ayheng

Last night's session was a rousing success, guanranteed by Boardgamecafe.net's three stooges: namely Jedi Council jack208, Jedi Knight ayheng and Jedi Padawan-Knight-to-be-coming-soon lostboyz.

The session was dealt a terrible blow early on as people started dropping out like flies and ayheng was delayed by urgent work. lostboyz and jack208 soldiered on at 8pm at OTK with a starting meal.

9pm and an urgent message was sent out: where are you? ayheng finally made it to OTK and the three power figures started discussing the serious business of the (boardgaming) FORCE. (yeah well, we talked mostly about upcoming and favourite releases while I ate my curry chicken rice dinner).

10pm thereabouts we adjourned to BGC and enticed laiwah to a game of Formula De! This fun racing game uses dice in a creative way, namely, you get a progressively better dice with higher numbers as you shift gears up, until you are in a lean-mean-unstoppable racing machine flying down the straight at gear 5! (of course, that is before you realize the wicked corners that are coming up and you burn rubber and metal to slow down frantically)

Laiwah and Ayheng discussing the La Rascasse corner.

Each player got 2 cars and as a result, there were 8 cars racing on the board. This game amazingly can handle 5 players with 2 cars each, or 10 players with one car each! A good game to have for the occasion of having 8+ players.

Lots of reckless drivers abound as the newbie racers went neck to neck into the corners, scratching paintjobs and occasionally, doing damage to their own bodywork. In a car that's designed for two races, some of the (shall-not-be-unnamed-to-protect-their-identity) players limped past the chequered flag in the first lap with a badly damaged car.

[jack208] Lostboyz's Williams (blue) zooming past jack208's Ferrari (red)
in the final straight when Lostboyz threw a 20 in 5th Gear! jack208's Ferrari
was actually almost a total wreck; having gone into corners aggressively and
"bumped" into a few too many cars. :P

The corner mechanics are pretty neat as it forces the racers to stop a requisite number of times in the corners in a low gear before shifting up for the exit. The lane changing mechanic is also quite inspired as it often creates a situation where the front driver can benefit from an open lane to change lanes according to how fast his car is going. Whereas the back driver will find himself putting the brakes on his car when confronted by the blocking maneuver of the front car. Definitely a game to play for the experience of car racing.

[jack208] The two leading teams - Renault (yellow) and Williams (blue)
attempting to block off the corner from the incoming pack.

The game comes with two tracks and lots of expansion tracks to bid on e-bay. The tracks that came with the game are quite good as it features the technically demanding Monaco circuit and the (comparatively) more relaxed Holland circuit.

The game's a bit longish as it took the 4 of us about 2 hours to finish 1 lap. The rules are not particularly tough and the main strategy is in trying to get out of a corner fast enough to outrun the rest.

In our game, lostboyz's first car on the starting grid ended up finishing second last due to his prudent taking of the corners while his last car ended up finishing first due to his risk taking on going into the corners. jack208 also did well with one of his cars, showing us how to go into a corner fast and then take a minor fuel penalty to fast-downthrottle rapidly. I did okay with both my cars finishing consistently in the middle. laiwah took too many a safe approach and was thus left in the dust by other maniac pedal-to-the-metal drivers. Although, to be on the fair side, she would have won if we did two laps like we originally promised to.

The race result for 070608 Monaco

Jack208's comment on the BGC Monaco race.
This was a 1st race for everyone (except me who had done a 2-lap race on Monaco a couple weeks back). We initially decided to do a 2-lap race so that we can use pitstop as part of our strategy. In the end, as the cars were limping towards the end of Lap 1 we decided it's better to just end the race there as.... i) this is a learning game and hence a 1-lap race is equally satisfying, and ii) a few of our cars probably won't make it till end of Lap 2. hehe.....

Obviously this kinda messed up the plans of those who were driving a little bit prudently as a 2-lap strategy (eg. laiwah's Honda) since they'll likely not be in the lead coming into the end of Lap 1, as compared to those reckless drivers who burn tyres like there's no tomorrow and scrapping each other's bodywork off by driving too close to one another.

The Mirabeau corner and the subsequent Loews Hairpin turn is the first test
for budding F1 drivers.

We did a 4 team race on the Monaco track with each team having 2 cars. The roster of F1 cars and their managers.

Williams (blue), manager: lostboyz
Renault (yellow), manager: ayheng
Honda (green), manager: laiwah
Ferrari (red), manager: jack208

The Monaco track is a slow and tight track. You hardly get to test your car in 6th gear and there's only a couple of long straights where you get to zoom into 5th. But if you get into those long straights not at 5th gear then you'll likely lose ground. Therefore the ability to get into corners fast and sharp so that you can exit at speed would be key in determining how well you do in this track.

The Mirabeau Corner is often the first key - and in the first lap, it can be deadly as most cars would bunch in to this corner at the same time making it very congested. After Mirabeau you get a short straight and immediately you'll be confronted with the 180º Loews Hairpin turn. It's not uncommon to see cars dragging thru this in 1st Gear.

The Loews turn is also where blocking tactics can be employed to fend off the chasing pack. In the picture above, the two leading teams (Renault and Williams) were closing off the Loews turn to prevent the chasing pack from overtaking them.

The Ferrari managed to squirm itself into a good position between the
Renaults and Williams, coming into the Portier double-corners.

However fortune favors the bold and aggressive. If you can maneuver the Loews Hairpin and gain a good position coming out of the turn and into the Portier sharp-right, you stand a chance to open a gap with the chasing pack (or catch-up with the leading cars).

In another race also at Monaco (Landak Gamers), another driver did a very aggressive but sharp turn into this section and not only caught up with the pole leader, but overtook him as he sped out of the Portier turn into the tunnel straight....... he went on to win the race. Obviously if he mistimed his corners, he would end up a total wreck!

The leading cars once out of the Portier corners, speeding off in high gear
while the chasing pack is still navigating the double right-handers.

However Ferrari's aggressive driving in the Mirabeau-Loews-Portier section was not without cost as it sustained some bodywork damage due to minor collisions with the other cars as everyone jostled for position in those tight corners.

The cars speeding past the Piscine "S". You can see the swimming pool in
the middle of the photo.

Renault were driving a hard race with both their cars in the leading pack. Williams obviously still has one of its car in the lead while Ferrari managed to insert one of its among the leaders. Honda was driving more prudently obviously planning to go the distance in the 2nd lap.

After Piscine is a very tight 180º right-hander named the Rascasse Corner. The corner looks rather "harmless" and "easy" but appearance can be deceiving. This is the corner that can win (or lose) you the race especially since it's just one more corner away from the final straight (grandstand).

Cars speeding into the tight La Rascasse corner which is a 180º-turner.

In this race, Renault was in pole heading into the Rascasse with Ferrari and Williams closing the gap. A combination of aggressive (and some said reckless) driving and sharp positioning allowed the Williams (blue-white) to close the gap and overtake the Renault (yellow-blue).

LostBoyz (right), team manager for Williams (blue) pondering on his next
move as he watched his leading Williams car being overtaken by a reckless
Ferrari in the Rascasse Corner.

Ferrari (red-yellow) taking advantage of a slight hesitation from Williams then cut across the corner and claimed pole for the first time in this race, coming out of the Rascasse. Thus in the blink of a corner, Renault has dropped from pole to third position. This is the importance of taking the Rascasse well.

In another incident from the Landak Gamers race, the driver who was in 3rd position coming into the Rascasse Corner for the final lap, with the 4th placed driver in hot pursuit, attempted to take this corner too fast, spun and can only watched while his pursuer sped past him to a podium finish (3rd).

So neglect the Rascasse at your own peril.

Even tho' Ferrari did well to grab pole from Williams in the Rascasse, the Williams driver were not to be denied this victory! He floored the accelerator (rolled 20 in 5th Gear!) and raced neck-to-neck with the Ferrari in the final straight, piping Ferrari to the chequered flag by a nose-length.

Note: Oh, by then we'd decided to change this race into a single-lap race. Therefore the results don't really matter as we took this as a learning game for everyone. As Heng mentioned in his report (see above), Honda would have done better if we did complete this as a 2-lap race.

Williams taking the chequered flag. Ferrari lost by a nose-length while
Renault took the last podium finish.

MONACO STATISTICS
- 18 corners (15 marked corners in the Formula De track)
- 3.34 km in real distance (1+ hr per lap in Formula De time)

FORMULA DE LEAGUE
On the following day, the gamers at Mage Cafe also brought this game to the table and did the Zandvoort (Holland) track. They enjoyed this game so much we are planning to do a Formula De Championship which would cover a few different tracks such as Sepang, Shanghai, Suzuka, Imola, Buenos Aires, etc. Points will be scored for Drivers and Constructors. If you are interested to take part in our Championship, sign-up at this thread.

NOTE: For those wishing to buy this game, sadly it is already OOP (out-of-print) and also out-of-stock with us. The last (and final) reprint from Asmodee has now been sold out. You may scan eBay for listings but do expect to pay a lot for those listed there.

Wallenstein
reported by ayheng

One game down, one more to go. Round 2 started at 12am with jack208 explaining the rules of Wallenstein to ayheng and lostboyz. rhyen temporarily got the boyz' hopes up by declaring that he was making his way from Mages to Boardgamecafe. Which however he did not turn up. And so we settle into a three player game.

The game's of area-control game with some wargaming elements settled by the infamous cube-tower! How it works is like this: you take your army cubes, you take your opponents army cubes, shake it up in your hand and throw them into the cube tower! some cubes will get stuck, and other cubes got stuck there before might come unstuck! So what happens is an interesting result which favors the person with the more cubes... MOST of the TIME. Not always. Sometimes your cube just don't want to drop out.

Cube towers aside, there's some planning to be had each round which seriously causes some mind-f*** going on. Players start guessing and second guessing other people's actions. As all actions are put down first and then revealed simultaneously, this will cause some serious screwage to happen as players' plan are thrown into wreck by unforeseen moves. Glorious!

[jack208] The Action Cards that determine the sequence those actions will
be executed. Players plan their actions for each season based on this sequence.

jack208 seems to get the strategy on this one as he finishes a respectable 2nd after losing precious points in the first year to a peasant riot. Myself did badly as I didn't manage to get building majority on many provinces. lostboyz with his devil-may-care attitude went on a province grabbing spree managed to finish first as he was able to put down his rioting-starving-peasants. Nice game.

[jack208] LostBoyz (blue) seems to be heading for a major peasants' revolt
during Winter coz his provinces haven't been producing any grain!

Note: Wallenstein is already an OOP game. However it has recently been republished as Shogun; fully English edition, improved game board with scoring track, and some enhancement to the rules. You can get Shogun here.

The Downfall of Pompeii
reported by ayheng

The night finishes with more talk and finally a lite game of The Downfall of Pompeii to intro to lostboyz. This game is very lite and is right up 'litegamer' lostboyz' alley. Another satisfied tossing-meeples-into-da-burning-volcano customer.

Woo hoo! three games in a nite, we finished at 4-ish. Highlight for me tonite was Formula DE. But I don't recommend anyone to get it because I WANT IT (wait till my next budget, sigh).

The above report is also published in Heng's Gaming Blog.

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Fri Meetup @ Old Town Kopitiam 16/3/07 - Caylus, 1856

jack208 — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 12:27:00 GMT

Gamers: Ainul (aanemesis), Alan Tan, Vincent, and Jeffrey Au (jack208)

Games: Caylus, 1856

Location: Old Town Kopitiam, Cheras
Date/Time: 16 March 07 (Fri) 8.00 PM - 2.00 AM

KL BOARDGAMES MEETUP REPORT @ OLD TOWN KOPITIAM CHERAS 16/3/07
by jack208

THE FUTURE OF 18XX IS BRIGHT

Our usual Fri evening meetup at Old Town Kopitiam (OTK) but this week looks like a weak turnout day with many of the regulars on dinner appointment, and one going down to Singapore for some event involving shifting alphabets around.

However Boardgamecafe.net do have an event earlier from 6pm. We hosted a 2-hr Children Birthday Boardgames Party at Old Town Kopitiam and thus some of us were there earlier to facilitate the children boardgames.

CAYLUS
reported by jack208

If 1856 looks like the staple diet of OTK, then Caylus seems to be the staple appetizer here!

After facilitating a round of Memoir '44 for the children, I found Ainul trying to start a 2-player Caylus game with Alan Tan. How can! So I prompted interrupted and got myself inserted into a 3-player game.

Sorry, picture out of focus but still must post coz it's Ainul's inaugural win of Caylus, yah!

I believe after this evening's game, Caylus went up to 9 in Ainul's rating (coz he won our 3-player game!) Well played Ainul!

1856 (UPPER CANADA)
reported by jack208

Next we did... ar... 1856.

Actually I brought Puerto Rico which I intend to bring to the table but since Vincent (our new member from last week) arrived and he's like V E R Y K E E N to learn the 18xx games, we thought it would be good to do a learning game for him, fixing the end-game to 2am (that's when OTK closes on Fri).

I won't go into details for this session as it was meant to be a learning game for Vincent (read: very the friendly) to learn the ropes of the various phases and trigger points in the game. The four public companies started at SR#1 were GW (jack208) at $80, BBG (vincent) at $75, LPS (alan) at $65, and CPR (ainul) at $65.

Trains were sold quite slowly... but it did get to a tense stage when the last type-4 trains were sold. At that time, Ainul and jack208 have 2 companies each. Ainul's CPR and CV having one Type-4 train, while my GW has a 4/5 and CA has 3/5. BBG (vincent) has a 3/5 while Alan's LPS has 3/4.

That was an interesting moment including the chance for Double Hotsun which Mr CPR was kind enough not to execute as he wanted the session to be Friendly one mah...

BBG did manage to drive quite far and has potential for good runs

The usual western trinity. Some interesting builds here with a key build in the small towns south of Kitchener

CV coming out from Toronto but later getting tokened out (an important choke point)

Our 18xx Vice Prez (right) showing new 18xx "fan" Vincent (left) how to feel the Force

We find that 4-player 1856 is a very good set up for learning game. If you decide to play the game for a fixed amount of time say 3 hrs, a newbie can learn the ropes easily without having to invest in a break-the-bank session as it's very likely the early choices made by the newbie won't be very advantageous.

BUILDING THE FOUNDATION FOR 18XX
reported by jack208

Remember I mentioned about the children having their boardgames party earlier? They enjoyed themselves tremendously till 930pm.

The new younglings enjoying their boardgame sessions (read report here)

But more importantly, they represent the future of 18xx! We'll be assigning some Padawans to monitor the progress of these younglings as they undergo their Jedi (Boardgame) Initiate programme. The bright ones from these younglings shall be chosen by the Padawans and be sent to the Jedi 18xx camp for fast fast induction into our 18xx programme.

So the future looks bright! More mini HotSun coming.... hehe

The identity of these two Padawans shud be kept secret to prevent disturbance from the Dark Lord Sidious

Click here for more photos of this gaming session.
For more gaming reports, visit our Boardgame Meetup Reports Blog.
To discuss this gaming session, visit our forum in BoardgameCafe.net

If you wish to join our boardgame meetups, check out our Meetup Calendar and sign up now at KL Boardgames Meetup!

To buy the games played in this meetup, visit our Web Store. We carry over 200+ games and provide prompt delivery to anywhere in Malaysia.

16-03-2007

Fri Meetup @ Old Town Kopitiam and Boardgamecafe.net 9/3/07 - Caylus, 1856, Werewolves, Puerto Rico, Antiquity

jack208 — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 13:14:00 GMT

Gamers: Heng (ayheng), Alvin (aycee), Henry Yeo (rhyen), Ainul (aanemesis), Alan Tan, Long (LostBoyz), Ken (Wolfx), Vincent, and Jeffrey Au (jack208)

Games: Caylus, 1856, Werewolves (Lupus in Tabula), Puerto Rico, Antiquity

Location: Old Town Kopitiam and Boardgamecafe.net, Cheras
Date/Time: 9 March 07 (Fri) 8.00 PM - 6.00 AM

KL BOARDGAMES MEETUP REPORT @ OLD TOWN KOPITIAM & BOARDGAMECAFE.NET CHERAS 9/3/07
by aycee, rhyen, and jack208

BREAKING THE 1856 CODE

The usual Fri evening meetup at Old Town Kopitiam (OTK) after we managed to break-the-bank last week (report still pending, sigh). Our break-the-bank session last 7+ hrs last week and it was even mentioned in our forum that "doing 1856 in 3 hours is the Holy Grail of Boardgaming", but everyone's still keen to come back again for another 1856 session, which is fast becoming the HOTTEST game this part of the gaming world.

But I bet surely no one expected what happened next in this week's 1856 session. Read on and you'll find out.

Caylus
reported by jack208

Three gathered at OTK for dinner at 730 pm - Ainul, Alan and Jeff. No. 4 (Henry) joined us soon after and we quickly embarked on our usual appetizer for Fri evening - Caylus.

While the Caylus session was going on, gamer no. 5 Long (LostBoyz) arrived.

We ended Caylus quickly by pushing the provost forward. Henry won, Ainul continued to wonder at the game, and the rest of the gamers trickled in - Alvin (aycee) and Heng (ayheng). Ken (wolfx) was supposed to car-tag with Heng but he's not here yet. Forgot to ask Heng what happened (but Ken did arrive later around 10ish).

We quickly settled our bill and adjourned to Boardgamecafe.net centre for our main agenda for the evening - a 6-player session of 1856!

1856 (Upper Canada)
reported by rhyen; with photo comments and notes by jack208

The shortest 1856 game ever!!! (In Malaysia that is)
A.K.A.: Don't need to hotsun one to screw someone!!!
A.K.A.: Learning to be a corporate raider!!!

Basically, after letting me win another game of 4-players Caylus at OTK (I kid you not. The proof is to your right, I am playing BLUE), the gang headed back to BGCLand to do 6-players 1856.

We have Jeff, Ainul, Ay Heng, Long, Aycee, Alan and me (7 people). So, how do you play 6-player game with 7? Easy, we paired up Long with Aycee as his consultant/advisor/schemer-in-crime (who somehow managed to also become the banker throughout the game, asking people to exchange dollar notes).

The Six who started - Alan, Long (his advisor Aycee hidden by him), Ainul, Henry, Heng and Jeff (holding camera)

The starting order went: Henry (why do I always draw first in 1856?), Heng, Jeff, Alan, Long & Aycee, Ainul.

Results of Bids for private companies:

Flos Tramway: bought for cost $20 by Henry
Canada: Alan for $45
Waterloo: Long & Aycee for $55
Great Lakes Shipping: Ainul paid $95 (interestingly, there were 3 bidders on this one, Henry, Jeff and Ainul. Henry pulled out leaving Jeff and Ainul to drive the price up on this one)
Niagara: Heng for $105
St Claire: Jeff for cost $100

1st round of profit taking (from private company) as per usual.

~~Private~~ Public companies started:

Alan: GW ($65 per share)
Long: LPS ($65 per share)
Ainul: CPR ($70 per share)
Henry: GT ($75 per share)
Heng: WR ($65 per share)
Jeff: CA ($70 per share)

additional stocks brought:

Henry: 1 share of CPR

Operating round #1:
All companies laid tracks and bought trains (5 level 2 trains were sold, 1 left.) in their 1st round (except for Jeff's CA since he has no legal train route and cannot be forced to buy). Everyone wonder whether he would connect to a city first before the last level 2 train is sold.

Stock round #2 (priority with Heng):

Long: 1 share of LPS

*Please note that all photos of stock round are taken prior to any trading of shares

Operating round #2:
All companies laid tracks and didn't buy any additional trains yet (Jeff's CA still managed to avoid do any train runs at all). GT, CPR, LPS and WR issued dividends while GW withhold dividends. CA still can't run and watches its share prices decline in tandem with GW.

OR#2: Tracks laid by GW (Alan), LPS (Long) and CA (Jeff) in the West

OR#2: Tracks laid by CPR (Ainul) and GT (Henry) in the North-East

OR#2: Tracks laid by WR (Heng) in the South-East

OR#2: All companies earning $5 EPS except for CA which has no route yet.

OR#2: Stock market position. CA has no route but GW has $5 EPS but chose to withhold

Stock round #3 (priority with Ainul):

Heng: 1 share of WR

Operating rounds #3:
There was 2 operating rounds in OR#3 as the 1st sale of the 3-train triggered Phase 4 (where there shall be two operating rounds).

1st OR: CPR bought the remaining level 2 train to maximise delivery, necessitating several other companies (LPS, CA and GW) to take on govt loans loan to finance their purchase of level 3 trains. Jeff's CA finally found a legal train route just in time for power through; two level 3 trains remaining.

Dividend: GT, CPR, WR, GW payout. LPS, and CA withhold.

2nd OR: All companies then started utilising green tracks up upgrade existing tracks rather than expand and everyone's dividends soar.

Dividend: GT, CPR, WR, LPS payout. CA and GW withhold.

(Please note that CA and GW have finally moved into the yellow zone, as noted in the next photo). CA took another govt loan while CPR joined the ranks of company with debts liable to the Chanucks.

EPS chart after OR#3: GW now performing best with $14 EPS while CA with its new level 3 train earned $7

Stock round #4 (priority with Jeff):

Jeff: 1 share of GT at $75
Ainul: 1 share of CPR
Henry: 1 share of GT
Heng: 1 share of WR
Jeff: sells GT share at $90 (blast you Jeff, corporate raider)
Heng: sell WR shares
Jeff: buys 1 share of CA

Operating rounds #4:
1st OR: GT, CPR and WR upgraded key cities and maximised their runs. CPR & WR both take out govt loans to finance the purchases of the last two level 3 trains. LPS expanded GW's eastern route but neglected to place his remaining station marker, which GW dutily complied to hem in LPS (thereby necessitating LPS to break out northwest of London later).

Note from jack208
Here, LPS missed a good opportunity to completely cut out GW and make his life terribly painful. If LPS has placed a token in the city south of Barrie (see picture below), and CA (which runs after LPS) likewise placed another token, this would have locked out GW (which runs last of the three companies in the West) from i) being able to use both its level 2 and level 3 trains, and ii) unable to destinate until it breaks out of that deadlock.

OR#4: The three companies in the West building up a profitable network. CA and GW have placed their station markers to lock out LPS from going further south.

Dividends: GT, and WR issue dividends, CPR, LPS, GW and CA withhold dividends; GW share prices dropped into the dreaded brown zone). CA takes out another govt loan and buys the 1st level 4 train, essentially wiping out everyone's level 2 train.

Note from jack208
CA has been planning to get the level 4 train for a few turns earlier by intentionally not connecting to a route and withholding its dividend. By getting that first level 4, CA achieved a few things: i) Everyone's level 2 trains were rusted with the bonus of wiping out GT's only level 2 train and forcing Henry into a FTP situation which nearly bankrupted him but in any case the damage would have set him back a few many good rounds, and ii) CA with a level 3 and now a level 4 train, pumped its EPS up to $20. The early rust of everyone's level 2 trains may meant most companies did not get breakeven from the cost ($100) of purchasing the level 2 trains.

OR#4: WR has now connected to its destination city and has started expanding westward from Buffalo. Pity the game ended prematurely else it would be interesting to see how WR fared in this instance as it has established a virtually unchallenged network in the South-East.

OR#4: In the North-east, CPR has completed its link to Toronto while GT started branching out to expand (but were hobbled by the FTP situation).

OR#4.1: Both CA and GW has entered the Yellow Zone.

2nd OR: GT's FTP requires Henry to sell off another GT and CPR share, depressing their share prices. but he rummages enough cash to finance the purchase (thanks to earlier profitable dividend issue; but must remember to keep for rainy days, Henry!). GT was unable to issue dividends as its only level 2 train were rusted from the previous round.

Dividends: WR, CPR, LPS and CA upgraded their tracks, maximised their runs and issued dividends. GW withheld dividends (dropping it's share prices further into the dreaded brown zone, about $35 per share).

The finished board after the operating round is to the right (below).

OR#4: EPS table at the end of Op Round #4. CA has jumped to $20 due to its level 3 and level 4 train combo while GT dropped to $0 due to FTP situation.

OR#4: CA playing a dicey game with the Govn Loans (has maxxed out to 3 loans) but that's needed in order to quickly finance the purchase of the level 3 and level 4 trains.

Stock round #5 (Priority with Alan):

Ainul: 1 share of CPR
Jeff: 1 share of GW (he starts conferring in Heng to shut down GW through stock price manipulation)
Alan: 1 share of GW
Long: 1 share of LPS (Long was contemplating buying GW shares after observing Jeff without realizing Jeff's ulterior motive, but Jeff warned him off and he decided to reinvest his profits back into his own company)
Heng: 1 share of GW
Jeff: sells GW shares (GW share prices drops to $30)
Alan: 1 share of GW
Heng: sell GW share (GW drops into the white zone, closes down)

The Hot-Dip maneuver - If you zoom to the Stock Market, you would notice GW hanging precariously just 2 boxes above the White Closed Zone. Sale of two shares will push GW over the edge....

Note from jack208
It was Heng who first spotted the Hot-Dip possibility. He nudged me and we contemplated for awhile whether to do it or not. Well, since it would be a historical moment for 1856-MY (we did not have any player bankruptcy for 1856 yet), we decided to go ahead. The funny thing was Long's eagerness to snap up GW shares when he saw us doing so. That was classic herd mentality at work! :P

The end result of the share price manipulation is shown on the right.

(Watch the hapless investor wind up his insolvent company)

Game ends: 1 hours 59 minutes. Why? Because a private investor has gone out of business!

Celebrating the Hot-Dip Moment when GW closes down after seeing its share price plummeted into the Closed Zone when stock raiders (Heng/Jeff) struck! If we were drinking Guinness, this would have qualified for the Guinness Moment photo.

Note from jack208
This was our 2nd 6-player 1856 game; the first was played some weeks back when most of us were still exploring the nuances of 1856. I've to say the dynamics of a 6-player game is so much different from that of a 4- or 5-player. With 4-player, there was more time for us to build our network, take some profits, then decide either to start 2nd company or grow current company long-term. With 6-player, the train rush comes quite early and each player has only enough starting capital (player starts with only $250) to barely form one company so FTP threat can be deadly. Can't wait to do another 6-player session.

Credits: This meetup report was cross-posted from Rhyen's Blog.

Werewolf (Lupus in Tabula)
reported by aycee

Wolf In Sheep's Clothings
We'd heard stories about it, but all of us put it down as stories to scare the children, to make sure they go to bed early.

All that changed when Goodman Jack was found dead, his throat torn out, his body a bloody mess near the village gates. Everyone remembered his accusation the day before, "There is a werewolf amongst us, and he holds post within the village council!"

That morning itself the whole village met to discuss Goodman Jack's death. No doubt about it, the killings were the work of a -gasp- werewolf. It wasn't just any boogeyman story any more. Given that our little village was isolated from the rest of the world, there was no doubt that the werewolf was lurking among us.

All villagers in good mood, it seems. Well, photo was taken before the wolves first killing

It wasn't a comforting thought. None of us would be able to sleep soundly until the werewolf was exposed and killed. Already, looking at the crowd, everyone carried with them folklore safeguards meant to protect them: cloves of garlic, pieces of silver, crucifixes...Village leaders Father ryhen, Goodman Long, Matron Ain, loreweaver ayheng, trader Wolfx, Chief Alan, old man Vincent and lexicographer aycee headed the council in attempts to expose the werewolf.

Goodman Long putting his points across

Father ryhen spoke first. Everyone else was scandalised as Father ryhen spoke of contacting the Village Seer, the local witch. While everyone acknowledge her prowress (and the necessity of having someone skilled in the arts of midwifery, herbology and other secret magicks), no one openly talked about her. Whatmore Father ryhen openly suggesting working with a heretic!

Everyone seems to be paying full attention to the ongoing discussion

Goodman Long voiced out against Father ryhen, condemning him and leading a group of villagers to believe that Father ryhen has been possessed by evil spirits and needs to be cleansed...terminally. Father ryhen's quiet manner was drowned out by Goodman Long's speeches, but not before causing the villagers to split into to groups of thought. However, having the majority of people behind him, Goodman Long and his mob burned Father ryhen at the stake as a heretic.

And they LAUGHED again... after Father Rhyen was lynced... geez

Everyone then went home, secured in their belief that their village is no longer under threat.

Old man Vincent was then found dead next morning. Dread swamped the villagers. Was there another werewolf lurking in our midst? Or, more horrifically, did we kill innocent Father ryhen in error!

Back to serious discussion after finding out OM Vincent was dead too

Matron Ain was suspected. A girl of easy virtues, she was accused of sneaking out at night and wandering about near old man Vincent's hut. Her remarks that we were 'stupid old men who cannot see beyond our noses' was a scream of defiance that went unnoticed. She died at the stake as well.

Next morning, Village Militia Chief Alan was found dead in his office. The MO was the same - ripped jugular, claw marks. This time there was no doubt amongst the guilt-ridden villagers. They were murderers, manipulated by the werewolf (or werewolves) to kill their own brethren while hiding their own tracks.

The survivors deciding again who to lynch

Throughout all this, village trader Wolfx had heard mutterings against him, but having no other basis than having the family name of Wolfx no one openly confronted him about being the werewolf. But with the werewolf still at large mutterings against him grew louder, the source of it coming from Goodman Long. Things came to a head among the village elders with trader Wolfx and Goodman Long at each other's throats (figuratively speaking) while village loreweaver ayheng and lexicographer aycee kept quiet. Since no incriminating evidence could be produced, the village elders decide to put the matter off till the following day.

And they LAUGHED again after yet another villager was lynched. Is this their way of coping with the guilt of lynching one of their own?

Next morning Wolfx was found dead. That night, loreweaver ayheng was visited by Goodman Long and lexicographer aycee, only to witness a ghastly transformation under the full moon...

Credits: This meetup report was cross-posted from Aycee's Blog.

Puerto Rico and Antiquity
reported by jack208

We did two rounds of Werewolves before ending R1 around 1230 am. Five of us stayed back for R2 - rhyen, ayheng, aycee, wolfx, vincent and jack208. Since both wolfx and vincent have not played Puerto Rico before, we took the opportunity to introduce them to this wonderful game.

Vincent has to take his leave after Puerto Rico but he'll be back next week. The four of us then did Antiquity before we said goodbye at day-break. And oh dim-sum at the nearby restaurant.

Click here for more photos of this gaming session.
For more gaming reports, visit our Boardgame Meetup Reports Blog.
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Fri Meetup @ Old Town Kopitiam & Boardgamecafe.net 26/1/07 - Blokus Trigon, 1856, Antiquity

jack208 — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 07:12:00 GMT

Gamers: Heng (ayheng), Alvin (aycee), Henry Yeo (rhyen), Ainul (aanemesis), Alan Tan, and Jeffrey Au (jack208)

Games: Blokus, 1856, Antiquity

Location: Old Town Kopitiam and Boardgamecafe.net, Cheras
Date/Time: 26 Jan 07 (Fri) 8.30 PM - 6.00 AM

KL BOARDGAMES MEETUP REPORT @ OLD TOWN KOPITIAM & BOARDGAMECAFE.NET CHERAS 26/1/07
by jack208 & ayheng

PART 1 - RAILROADING @ OLD TOWN

It's Friday and time for some of the top gamers in the Klang Valley to gather at their favorite Fri Gaming place @ Old Town Kopitiam for another evening of boardgaming. As discussed last week, we decided to skip the fillers and jump straight into the heavies (e.g. 1856) this time around... so that we can do another heavies in R2.

Regular readers of this blog will know that gaming @ Old Town and Boardgamecafe on Fridays dun end until 5- or 6-am the following morning so we'll have plenty of opportunities for the longer and heavier games to be brought to the table. Games such as 18xx, Die Macher, Antiquity, Roads and Boats, Twilight Imperium 3, Indonesia and (whisper whisper) maybe even "7 Ages" one day!

Blokus
reported by jack208

Ainul and myself were the first to get ourselves to Old Town therefore we got ourselves seated, ordered a Nasi Rendang Ayam (one of their signature dishes) for myself, ice lemon tea for Ainul, hot white coffee for me, and started with Blokus Trigon for two.

If you enjoy playing Blokus, you'll likely enjoy Blokus Trigon. Instead of square shapes, you get triangular shapes (hence the name "Trigon"). Gameplay is still the same, you attempt to lay as many of your trigon tiles as you can.... tiles can only touch the corner of your other tiles and not the sides.

However since the tiles are triangular in shape, it does offer a new perspective of blokus-tile-laying! Some tiles are shaped such that it allows one to wriggle yourself out of really tight situation.....

The hexagonal board offers a new take on the classic Blokus

Best of all, the Trigon ver plays very well with three (unlike the Classic ver which does not do 3-players very well). If you haven't try Blokus Trigon, you owe it to yourself to give it a spin! Come by Old Town on Friday and you'll always find a Blokus set and gamers to play with.

1856 (Upper Canada)
reported by jack208

Henry was the next to arrive after he's done with his gym session. While he was looking at the menu to decide on his dinner, we got a surprise! Alvin (aycee) dropped in with Heng (ayheng) and Alan Tan.

We had thought Heng was not able to make it tonite as he has a Gua Tempurung trip tomorrow with his girlfren but surprise surprise he turned up! Guess the boardgaming bug is strong in this fella. :)

While Henry was slurping his dinner (prawn mee), I took the opportunity to explain the 1856 rules and differences to Alan and Alvin. Both of them have done a learning game of 1856 earlier so it's a matter of just getting them up-to-speed.

Ainul and Heng setting up the game

We did a 4-player 1856 session last week, and this week we'll get to experience a full 6-player 1856 session! We quickly draw for player turn order (Ainul, Heng, Alan, Aycee, Jeff, Henry) and then proceeded to the auction for the private companies.

In the private companies auction, each player ended up with one private comp; (in order of ascending cost) Jeff (Flos Tramway), Alan (Waterloo), Aycee (Canada Company), Ainul (Great Lakes), Henry (Niagara Falls), and Heng (St Clair).

First consideration is cash... with 6 players, each player gets only $250 starting capital less whatever they paid for their private companies, not a lot considering the lowest par is $65 and the public companies will begin to operate as soon as the President's Certificate (two share) is sold. This means if no one else invest in your company at the start, it's likely to be cashstrapped!

With that in mind, each of the player still chose to capitalize their own public companies except for aycee who chose a different path. It is true that businessmen in this era built railways more on hope than on solid financial basis! Ainul and Heng both capitalized CPR and CA respectively for $80 par while Jeff started GW at $70. Henry and Alan took WR and WGB at $65 par.

Aycee on the other hand, formed an investment group called "WiiSe Capital LLC" and started wisely investing into railways that were profitable. Through his investment, the GW started operations with 40% of its IPO subscribed while the CA and WGB were 30% subscribed. The other two were a little undercapitalized at 20% only.

Everyone's busy with the start-up operations of their first railway company

The respective CEOs were soon busy with their railway start-up operations, building tracks where it's profitable, buying a Type-2 train each and started making money on their routes. Except for GW who bought two Type-2 trains since it has an early route from London to St Thomas and was already building quickly towards its second route from London eastwards to Woodstock.

Most CEOs - wanting to please their investors in the beginning - paid good dividends and as a result their share prices appreciated. The WiiSe Capital company ran by aycee was doing quite well too getting some returns from its early investment. It started to acquire more stakes in various other railway companies.

WGB under the capable management of CEO Alan, after having established good routes from Guelph southwards to Galt and Brantford, and now aggressively building northwesterly towards Goderich (its destination city) decided to acquire one Type-3 train to boost its earnings. CEOs Ainul and Heng not to be outdone, quickly purchased their Type-3 train as well, and at the same time expanding their railway business - CPR southwards to Toronto and CA towards Sarnia - to leverage their new engines.

Most of these companies were undercapitalized initially, so they had to get some Government loans in order to maintain their liquidity but since they were doing well with their routes, they had no problem servicing the loan interest and most of them even continued to pay out good dividends.

The Good Times are here: CEO Alan (WGB) having some laughs with Venture Capitalist Aycee (of WiiSe Capital) at the Railway Club.

CEO Jeff of GW was really making some good money.. and soon, he started his second railway company - LPS at $100 par - which already had most of its tracks built by CA and GW! Jeff immediately bought a Type-3 train (the last one) and LPS started making money almost on its first day of operations! Aycee, being a sharp-eyed investor quickly spotted the potential and took up one share in LPS as CEO Jeff promised them LPS will be paying out good dividends.

The CEO of CA (Heng) were seen manipulating the share market by getting his proxies to buy and then sell back CA shares to the Open Market... making it 100% fully subscribed. His proxies made some capital gains by selling the shares quickly back to the Stock Market. CA has strong fundamentals, were making profitable runs, and thus money were good for the shareholders and the company itself.

Note: Shares in the Open Market contribute dividends to the company itself, instead of to the bank (for unsubscribed shares) hence this method is a very smart - and legitimate - way of putting back the dividend income into the company's cash coffer.

By now, CEO Aycee were busy entertaining the various railway CEOs in order to determine his subsequent investments. The early investment round was paying back for WiiSe Capital but while it's making good money for Aycee, the question remains whether the CEOs themselves were raking in more!

Railroad Tycoon-wannabe Jeff now controlling two railway companies - GW and LPS

Alas, Good Times do not last forever.

With advancing technology comes the cost of obsolescence. The Type-2 trains which have been serving these railway businessmen so well in the early years of the railway business are now giving way to rust and the efficiency of the new Type-4 trains which promise even greater efficiency and every railway businessmen knew that translate to higher profits.

Dilemma for the CEOs as they now need to withhold dividends in order to prepare their companies for the pending capital expense of upgrading their Type-2 trains to Type-4. Obviously shareholders were not happy with the non-issuance of dividends and that's reflected in the drop of their shares' market value.

CEO Ainul (CPR) and Heng (CA) pondering their next business directions as they realized their Type-2 trains need to be replaced soon

LPS was paying out good dividends - as promised by its CEO - and soon it was attracting more investment, some even coming from rival railway CEOs! This surge of capital allows LPS to acquire one of the brand new Type-4 train which further boost its revenue.

CPR, CA and WGB followed LPS and upgraded their Type-2 trains to Type-4. WR (Henry) was a little late to the action and had to fork out a lot more to buy one of the Type-5 trains, which boasted more power but relatively untested at that point in time. The manufacturer even claimed that their Type-5 trains will never need to be replaced. Only time will tell whether that's money well-spent by WR.

CEO Jeff then executed a questionable maneuver..... he authorized a purchase order from GW to buy one LPS Type-4 train for an undisclosed sum. While this provided GW with two trains to bring in more revenue, it left GW low in cash, and LPS a little weak on the train department. Obviously LPS shareholders were not happy, and demanded an explanation. GW shareholders were concerned as well.

At the Press Conference, CEO Jeff not only pacified his shareholders but instead made them happier when he announced that LPS was selling its old Type-4 train to GW in order for LPS to raise sufficient capital to buy one of newest Type-5 trains. In fact, he even invited CEO Henry of WR - the first railway company in Canada to testdrive the Type-5 train - to give his testimonial to support the purchase of the Type-5 train, which was touted as the Engine of the Future!

CEO Jeff at the LPS Press Conference explaining why LPS sold its Type-4 train to GW, another company controlled by him. CEO Henry of WR who was invited to this press conference was caught falling asleep.... hmm, was the Press Conference that boring?

The LPS announcement drove investors to quickly come onboard and LPS shares were fully subscribed. This provided more cash for LPS to begin its expansion in the southwestern map after acquiring the Type-5 train.

Jeff held another Press Conference where he explained that since GW will soon arrive at its destination city (Detroit), it will be able to access its escrowed capital and thus the temporary low cashflow situation should not be a concern as having two trains will more than double its revenue.

Due to its proximity with LPS, and the fact both were owned by the same CEO, GW were also enjoying a very profitable run with its Type-3 and Type-4 trains. This naturally attracted more investors, which brought in more working capital for GW. GW meanwhile were indeed doubling its revenue with both its trains fully maximized.

On the northern part of Canada, CPR was also growing very fast and CEO Ainul while maintaining a low profile has been laughing all his way to the bank. CA with its good and profitable central routes were maxxing out its Type-3 and Type-4 trains. CEO Heng instead of expanding CA's operations decided to diversify his holdings into rival railway companies including Jeff's GW. Very soon, Heng was the first to reach the investment limit of 10 certificates else with his financial might, he might buy up a few more shares in his rival companies.

WR were performing a series of tricky track-laying exercises around the Niagara Falls region, connecting Buffalo, Fort Erie, Welland and extending to Hamilton. Their CEO promised great riches once those tracks are completed... but investors were cautious and preferred to adopt a wait-and-see attitude.

WGB on the other hand were undecided whether it should expand northwest or go southeast towards Welland. Or maybe east heading for the rich market of Toronto. In fact, the growth of Toronto and the northeastern region was generally acknowledged to be CEO Ainul's good work with his CPR railway company. He has transformed Barie and Toronto from being out-of-the-way cities into one that's populated by the upper-middle market.

Alan of WGB consulting with his largest investor, Aycee of WiiSe on his next expansion plan.

As the last Type-5 train was bought by WGB and with the imminent announcement of their newer Type-6 train and with an booming local economy that demands trains that can service longer routes, the rush to be the first few to acquire these powerful engines and thus hope to dominate the railway industry in Canada began!

CEO Jeff, who has delivered so far on his two companies GW and LPS, executed another questionable maneuver. He was moving trains (assets) between LPS and GW.... but since he managed to account for his previous maneuver and in fact delivered more profits for his stakeholders, the investors adopted a passive stance towards this restructuring.

Heng thinking to himself, "Hmmm, this Jeff must be up to something..."

That's when it happened. The dreaded HotSun maneuver.

On the next stock round, Jeff promptly dumped 50% of his GW shares to the Open Market, making $600+ in the process...... Shares of GW had been pushed up to $125 through a series of continuous dividend payout, and bumping up due to it being fully subscribed. The consequence of this massive selling (which pushed GW share down to $90) resulted in Jeff vacating his CEO position for Heng to take over.

Heng receiving the GW charter on being appointed as the new CEO

On completing his due diligence, Heng realized that GW has been stripped of most of its cash, has only a Type-3 train and a high level of Government loans. He has to think quickly how to salvage the situation without him getting his personal funds drained trying to help GW (if the Type-3 train becomes obsolete and he's forced to get a new Type-6 train). Some quick shuffling of assets between GW and his profitable CA seemed to have resolve the problem with GW now having a Type-4 train and CA running a Type-3 and a Type-5 train. The crisis is temporarily averted.

Jeff (still owning LPS) started his next railway company GT and immediately got down to negotiating some arrangement with CEO Ainul, who basically controls the northeastern part of Canada with his CPR. They quickly reached some mutually beneficial agreements and the development of the northeastern region began earnestly.

Investors were now more wary of Jeff's intention with GT... and only Aycee's WiiSe took up a share. Not to be daunted, CEO Jeff decided to fund GT himself by taking up the bulk of GT's subscription (to the max 60%) and proceeded to build up GT's operations in the northeast together with Ainul's CPR.

Jeff starting his next company, GT

Alan of WGB then announced that his company will be the first to acquire the very latest technologically advance Type-6 trains. He has built up a good network around the central region to support the new engine. Annual forecasts for WGB were tripled and with its prospect looking good, share prices went up as more dividends were rolling out from WGB!

At this juncture, the Canadian Government intervened and forced all railway companies with Government loans to either repay their loans or join the national railway company - Canadian Government Railway (CGR). Some of the smaller railways were folded into CGR. Among the railway companies of the tycoons; only Heng's GW (formerly owned by Jeff) could not repay its loans and thus were absorbed into CGR, with a 1-for-2 exchange of existing shares with CGR shares. Heng was appointed its CEO due to his good record in running CA. Jeff, Henry and Aycee lost their investment in GW as they only held one share each which did not fulfill CGR's criteria for the share-swap exercise.

Heng promptly scrapped the existing Type-4 train and asked the Government to lend funds to "borrow" a Diesel train..... with unlimited capacity, Heng set up the diesel train to bring in the much-needed revenue to turnaround CGR, mainly running on the ex-GW's tracks which connects the busy western Canada with the lucrative central region.

Heng working out his game plan for the new railway giant, CGR

Having to "borrow" diesel train meant CGR could not afford to pay out dividends (though due to Government intervention, its share prices do not fluctuate or change, remaining at $100). Investors in CGR were getting fidgety.... will they see their money back?

At this moment, most railway companies have upgraded to at least one Diesel train... and were running very long and profitable routes. With the competition for routes heating up, Jeff started to use GT to place station markers at strategic cities in an attempt to cut-off the lucrative cities from his rivals. Soon Henry's WR was adopting the same tactic to protect it's southeastern turf.

Heng's CGR would have done the same except that it's now in "recovery mode" having to prep up its financials to afford its own diesel train before it can focus on any market protection activities but with the CGR's huge number of station markers, the other railway companies would surely follow CGR's development in this area with some trepidation.

>The game ended here as it was getting late (or early? 1am+) and some players have other commitments tomorrow morning. It was a very enjoyable game as we finally get to see CGR formed and running. We did not yet see how CGR will expand and its impact on neighboring railways.<

Names of the railway companies mentioned in this session, in order of appearance

CPR = Canadian Pacific Railway (par $80)
CA = Canadian Air Line Railway (par $80)
GW = Great Western Railway (par $70)
WGB = Wellington, Grey & Bruce Railway (par $65)
WR = Welland Railway (par $65)
LPS = London Port Sarnia Railway (par $100)
CGR = Canadian Government Railways (par $100)
GT = Grand Trunk Railway (par $100)

Note: We did not start any further new public companies after the CGR as time was running late (12+) and some players have to retire for the evening. We merely played for a few more rounds after the CGR and wound down the game.

Antiquity
reported by jack208

It was a good game of 1856... I'm sure we'll return for a rematch, this time with a computer to crunch the numbers especially in the late end-game stages. It was already closed to 2am and as we bid each other goodnite, three of us proceeded to Boardgamecafe.net centre (which is just a short walk away from Old Town Kopitiam) for Round #2 (R2).

As the three of us - Henry, Alan and Jeff - were walking to Boardgamecafe.net, we discussed about which games to bring to the table. Many names were mentioned - Caylus, End of the Triumvirate, Power Grid (nah, not good for three), Reef Encounter, Antiquity, Die Handler - we finally settled on Antiquity, a game which none of us have played yet.

Antiquity is what my mate - Edwin - calls the Louis Vuitton game from Splotter (the other two being Indonesia and Roads and Boats). They retail for USD100+, published in limited stocks so that the print run will be sold out very fast and its price appreciated many fold over at eBay!

I'd only read the rules a few days earlier and we all accepted that we shall be doing a testdrive of the game mechanics for this round. We started around 2am and were so engrossed that we reluctantly ended our game around 6am, then went up to nearby Yulek for some dim sum before we said goodbye for the day.

To find out why we think Antiquity is an awesome game for 2-, 3- or 4-player, watch out for Part II of this meetup report in a couple of days' time.

For the next meetup, everyone's calling for another round of Antiquity and perhaps Die Macher!

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