Beside organizing free & open boardgaming meetups regularly in the Klang Valley, Boardgamecafe.net have always been keen to get everyone together once in a while for a weekend retreat of boardgaming! After a very successful retreat back in 2006 (which was co-organized with Imagine Games), Boardgamecafe.net now brought you our very own (first) BGC Boardgamecafe Retreat which was held at 6,000 ft above sea level in Genting Highland’s First World Hotel (GICC).

 

 

There’s nothing more gratifying to a boardgamer than to be stucked in a place for the entire day with the company of like-minded boardgamers ….. and a room FULL OF EUROGAMES!!

 

 

Some of the games were newly minted arrivals just days before the Retreat such as Cyclades, Giants, Homesteaders, and Le Havre Grand Hameau. And our Retreat participants get to play these brand new games here first! 😛

 

 

The gamers shall play a series of different games at 3-4 tables over 4 rounds, all within the same day in a semi-competitive mode. And the winner (in points) stands to win a brand new copy of the just-arrived Homesteaders!

 

 

Gamers: Teddy, Lee Ching, Wong LC, Wolfx, Cristiano, Rob Street, Swee Nee, Lester, Arm, Heng, Li Li, Aanemesis, Waiyan, Jack208 and special guests Mukesh and Feliks.

 

Games: Duck Duck Bruce, Rat-a-tat Cats, Sleeping Queens, Three-of-a-Crime, In the Year of the Dragon, Stone Age, Manila, Homesteaders, Endeavor, Giants, Alhambra, Wasabi, Priests of RA.

 

Games on Special After8 Menu: Race for the Galaxy, Battlestar Galactica, Age of Industry, Le Havre, Dune.

 

(Buy these games from our Web Store)

  

Location: Genting First World GICC
Date: 17-18 July 2010 (Sat/Sun)

 

Without further ado, let’s dive into the session reports!!

 

 

 

 

Instead of randomly seating people into tables, we always start our Retreat with a “Seating” game ie. one that’s light and fast to play yet provides a method to organize the gamers into the starting tables. For this year, we decided to do something different and introduced children games as our Game Zero. Hehe.

 

 

The following games – Duck Duck Bruce, Sleeping Queens, Rat-a-tat Cat, and Three-of-a-Crime – are not what you would considered as eurogames the local boardgamers would be familiar with. I would even wager most of them are hearing and playing these games for the first time in this Retreat!! 😛

 

However these are all staple diets for our BoardgameKids game sessions where waiyan’s young students get to play these games in their weekly boardgaming sessions.

 

(Boardgamekids is an upcoming “boardgames in children education” spin-off from Boardgamecafe.net. Start “liking the BoardgameKids Facebook page if you are interested to find out more about this exciting initiative of ours.)

 

The table below showed how the tables were organized for Game Zero; 13 gamers with me sitting out to facilitate the event. Someone has to keep score, take photos and generally make sure the event kept moving forward, right? 😛

 

Table	Game Title	P1	P2	P3	P4	P5
1st	Sleeping Queens	waiyan	robstreet	swee nee	wonglc	wolfx
2nd	Three-of-a-Crime	arm	aanemesis	ayheng	lili
3rd	Rat-a-Tat Cat	teddy	lee ching	cristiano	lester

 

 

Table 1: Waiyan taught Rob, Swee Nee, Wong and wolfx (hidden by Wong) the Sleeping Queens game.

 

 

Table 2 saw Arm teaching Three-of-a-Crime to Heng, Li Li and aanemesis. Heng & Li Li liked the game so much, they actually bought a copy from us. He told me the game would be very good for their family gaming sessions. 😛

 

 

Table 3 saw Teddy showing the game of Rat-a-tat Cat to Cristiano, Lee Ching and Lester

 

 

Hmm.. Not sure if they are playing the game or just watching Lester perform his latest magic tricks!

 

 

Above: Analysis paralysis in a children’s game (hehehe)? Am sure rhyen will have a field day if he’s around!

 

 

In spite of their supposedly simple mechanics, some of these children games are pretty good fun for us adults to play as a warm-up to the actual boardgaming sessions later.

 

 

Finger pointing a-galore as each player attempted to be the first to accurately guessed the three partners-in-crime!

 

 

Two of the tables finished as scheduled but the last table on Sleeping Queens were taking an inordinately long time to finish what would have been a 10-15 min session. The rest who had finished theirs simply gathered around that table to see what’s the commotion about. LOL.

 

 

Some of the other “children” games brought but not played.

 

Finally after much laughing, hustling and edging, the Sleeping Queens session ended, and the gamers took a short break while I organized them into their new tables for the proper gaming sessions (ie the ones that matter in terms of scoring) beginning with Game One.

 

I think the gamers enjoyed this session of “different” but refreshing out-take on boardgames.

 

 

 

 

Okay.. now the serious gaming starts (but then again ,when you get analysis-paralysis even in Three-of-a-Crime, you really can’t say when the serious gaming started). 😛

 

 

We chose some of the older recent games to kickstart the semi-competitive rounds. The idea of getting gamers to a retreat such as this is to expose them to some of the older favourites which can sometimes be drowned by the deluge of new games.

 

Table	Game Title	P1	P2	P3	P4	P5
1st	In the Year of the Dragon	robstreet	ayheng	wonglc	cristiano
2nd	Stone Age	swee nee	li li	lester	arm
3rd	Manila	waiyan	wolfx	aanemesis	teddy	lee ching

 

Table 1 is usually the most competitive table in our retreats and as such it attracts the most “heavy” of the three games in each batch.

In the Year of the Dragon is what many would consider a “depressing” game. You start this game all smiles and hopes… but as the months (game turn) progressed, you stared at famine, disease, barbarians and even the Emperor of China won’t take kindly to you if you cannot pay his taxes. Life sucks and not many games exemplifies this point better than In the Year of the Dragon.

 

 

And should you survived all the disasters thrown at you, you still have to contend with cutthroat fellow gamers who ain’t going to give you an inch or breathing space. Haiz…

 

 

But the thing is… all these gamers told me they enjoyed this game very much!! I think secretly most eurogamers have streaks of macho-sadistic personality in them. LOL

 

 

For some reason, in this session everyone WAS jostling to be in front of the player turn order. Looks like Kiasu syndrome took over and nobody wanted to be the last in turn order. Here yellow was the most Kiasu of all!

 

 

In this session, both Rob (below) and AyHeng pandered better to the Emperor’s wishes and they were allowed to remain at Table 1 while WongLC and Cristiano were “deported” to Table 2 next round. Hehe.

 

 

Heng was the winner for this round.

 

What looks as beautiful as Pillars of the Earth, plays fast, has cool worker placement mechanic, and appeals to the ladies? Oh, it also has dice but is not random. Wait.. Did I just mention “dice” and “not random” in the same sentence? Ah.. I did. 😛

 

That’s Stone Age for you, a popular game in the “lighter fare” category and one of the better gateway games of recent years to join the ranks of Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride.

 

 

There’s an interesting “Starvation” strategy in this game, where you can choose to go without food (ie not feed your people and not have to worry about begging (take that, Agricola!)) but more importantly starvation can be a good means to an end (here). I think that’s why so many ladies like this!!

 

 

For this table, we have two ladies pitted against two gents. On my left, we’ve the beautiful ladies Swee Nee and Li Li….. while on my right, we’ve the *cough* hunks Arm and Lester.

 

And uhm.. who’s that dude in the middle? Hahaha. How come he’s so free gey-bohing (busybody) here? I thought he should be at some other table??

 

 

Arm, scratching head, “I thought CK told me this is a one-hour game…”

 

My thought was this session took a whole lot longer than it should. In fact, among the three games in this round, this game was the last to finish (even later than In the Year of the Dragon). But everyone enjoyed their Stone Age session and from feedback, it’s becoming one of Swee Nee’s favorite game.

 

 

Arm and Swee Nee were the winners from this table and they moved up to Table 1 for the next round which shall see them pitted against the Emperor’s fave sons Rob & Heng in the new darling game of the Lehman Bros, Homesteaders.

 

Lester and Li Li moved to Table 3 next for an interesting game of erecting Moais in Easter Island.

 

This is regretably one of the few games I would love to have in my collection but did not have (as it went out-of-print at the publisher’s level). It’s a very good game that’s lightweight and enjoyable.

 

 

Set in the pirate-infested islands of the Philippines, you are locals in Manila who smuggled shipments on fragile-looking punts from neighbouring islands into Manila, speculating on which commodity will strike gold and at the same time trying to avoid the pirates that lie in wait to plunder your boat.

 

 

We’ve five gamers in this table all vying to become the next “punt tycoon” from Manila. At its essence, it’s a bidding game but it’s structured such that you get to cushion your speculation with various other investments for eg “investing” in the pirates hoping they get to plunder one of your competitors’ boat (where you’ll get to share the spoils).

 

 

I was not at their table when the above happened but there’s an EMPTY boat sailing up to Manila? Looked like a real cutthroat game for this to happen! 😛

 

 

Teddy (above) putting his hands down to lay claim to Manila…. All mine! All mine!

 

 

Wolfx (in black) won this game in spite of Teddy’s raucous shout of “All Mine” – and I heard he did it comfortably but then again it WAS his game (boo!). Wolfx moved up to Table 2 together with Lee Ching (seated next to wolfx) for their new Endeavor challenge!

 

 

 

 

After the first round, you have the winners of Round 1 converging at Table 1 making it a “Hot” table that brought intense competition, while the mood was more genial in the other two tables. This is one of the interesting aspects of our retreat… you get some intensity and you also get lots of friendly gaming spirit. While our Retreat scored each player as they progressed thru the games, it’s friendly enough that some players do not really care about their scores and immersed themselves thoroughly in the games and enjoy!

 

 

Table	Game Title	P1	P2	P3	P4	P5
1st	Homesteaders	ayheng	robstreet	arm	swee nee
2nd	Endeavor	cristiano	wonglc	wolfx	lee ching
3rd	Giants	lester	li li	waiyan	aanemesis	teddy

 

This game has been the talk of OTK gamers even before it got to the Retreat… with one of the OTK regulars crashing thru all world records in indebtedness. The slippery slope between borrowing just-enough money in order to gain the most return, and going all the way into insolvency is so deliciously balanced in this game that I’m sure IMF privately admire it’s design. At OTK, we fondly named this slope the “Slope of Rhyen” in honor of his new IMF benchmark.

 

 Above: Looking on was one of CK’s colleague, Feliks who’s here on project matters all the way from Poland.

 

 

Swee Nee’s the only lady swimming with all the sharks in this table. You can see how intense she was. J

 

 

Finally as the game came to a conclusion – Rob and Arm retained their winning streak here – it’s all smiles as everyone heaved a sigh of relief having survived the slope of rhyen.

 

A relatively low profile game from last year (2009) and one that I bought on a hunch, it has however exceeded all our expectations and has became one of the faves of OTKers. Obviously it’ll get it’s share of play time in this Retreat.

 

 

Carrying the age of exploration theme (though some may argue it’s a little abstract), yet plays quickly under 2 hours. This game packs a lot into the short playing time, and has endeared Lee Ching after her first play here. Well, she did win this game after all.

 

 

Demonstrating that this game is indeed the “fastest to play” among the three games on the table for this round, this group finished their Endeavor session way before the other two tables (Homesteaders, Giants) and they even put in a couple of Taluva sessions (below) while waiting for the other two tables to finish.

 

 

TALUVA – a very beautiful but cutthroat game. One of wolfx’s favorite. Haven’t play this for some time, though. J

 

 

Wolfx continued to bemoan his bad losing streak as he yet again moved down to Table 3 next. LOL

 

 

The last game of this round – and one of the most visually striking among the three – was GIANTS, a recent release from Asmodee.

 

 

Five players play as tribe leaders, and they competed to be the one who lead their tribes to glory and fame by erecting the best-looking and imposing Moais in Easter Island (if Moais can be “best-looking”).

 

 

The game board is beautiful, it has lots of miniatures and compared to the cardboard tiles of the other two games – Endeavor and Homesteaders – this is a photo-favorite!

 

 

I’m not going to admit I was not biased but this game has more pictures of it taken compared to the other two. 😛

 

 

Statues of Moai lining up the coast of Easter Island with the five tribesmen hard at work…

 

 

The game itself is semi-cooperative since everyone should be working together to form a network with their kayu balak (logs) since it’s a limited resource shared by all.

 

 

I was actually afraid the gamers might not enjoy this game since this was one of the new arrivals (that arrived just a couple days before this Retreat) and I didn’t have the time to properly learn the game. Therefore the teaching of the rules was done rather haphazardly.

 

Should do a proper session back at OTK next time.

 

 

We’d a short tea-break before moving on to Game Three. Food!

 

 

 

 

We were running a little behind schedule at this point, and I was not hopefully that we can complete two more rounds (game three and game four). So I sounded out to the participants that this could very well be the last Game Round for today before we break for dinner.

 

Table	Game Title	P1	P2	P3	P4	P5
1st	Alhambra	robstreet	arm	wong lc	lee ching
2nd	Wasabi	ayheng	swee nee	aanemesis	lester
3rd	Priests of RA	wolfx	cristiano	waiyan	li li	teddy

 

 

The grand prize for the day, a brand new copy of HOMESTEADERS.

 

Since this is likely to be the last round of gaming for today, the players in this table went into “serious” mode as this session would potentially decide the winner for the brand new Homesteaders game. Plus bragging rights. J

 

Alhambra is usually played as a light gateway game but these gamers were really turning the game into an intense competition!

 

Finally – after much battling on the gardens of Alhambra – Rob Street (below) made it out successfully to be crowned as the Champion of 2010! Well done, Rob!

 

While the first table were focused on a fight-to-the-death for the throne, this table took on a more lighter mood with the delicious Wasabi on the menu.

 

 

This game has cute green wasabi cubes instead of dices… yet aanemesis was struggling to get to grips the technique of making chomp chomp wasabi. hehe

 

 

It’s a really beautiful game, and one that most ladies enjoy playing. This game should see more playing time in our regular meetup sessions.

 

 

 

 

Swee Nee swept all before her as she wasabi-ed her way to victory over the three gents!

 

 

Another unique feature of this Retreat is it’s mix of old and new games. While Alhambra was a 2003 release, Wasabi was a more recent 2008 game. However on table 3, we brought out another hot-off-the-plate new arrival PRIESTS OF RA which is a re-implement of Knizia’s 2002 RA.

 

 

I’ve always enjoyed RA and while the rule scoring might seem confusing to newbies, the Sun God bid tokens remains an interesting auction mechanic from Knizia’s RA.

 

 

Priests of RA attempts to streamline the scoring system to make it easier to be understood for beginners. Gameplay-wise, it’s similar to RA.

 

 

If you like RA, you’ll like this game as well. If you hate RA’s bidding mechanic, it’s not likely you’ll enjoy this too. 😛 

 

 

After almost 8 hours of semi-competitive gaming over 12 different games, we concluded our session for the day with a tabulation of the scores.

 

 

Rob (below, left) won the first prize with his 11 points though Arm was a close second at 10 points.

 

 

The “world café” format where players move up and down the tables ensure all players remain “in” the running for the prize until the last game of the day.

 

 

And to ensure everyone “wins” at our Retreat, we gave away some lucky draw prizes of the brand new Le Havre expansion. And even a consolation prize for finishing “last”!  🙂

 

 

The customary group photo!

 

After a long day of gaming, it’s time to sit down for some chow, to refuel our stomach. We split into two groups; one group going to the Nasi Kandar restaurant while our group settled for the Vietnamese Restaurant.

 

 

It was also wolfx’s birthday (dude to the right below) so a few of us bought him his b’day dinner!

 

 

Food was a-plenty and yummy….

 

 

After taking care of food… it’s time for the highlight of the Retreat; the AFTER 8 GAMING sessions where you get to play those long-hours, rare, usually OOP and often complex epic games!

 

You do not come to a boardgame retreat so that you can bum around in the evening at the poolside or casino or (aghast!) golfing. You come to events like this becoz you want to spend the entire day BOARDGAMING!!

 

Therefore besides eat/sleep, sorry.. I meant to say beside taking time out to eat (sleep? Wat’s that?) you want to spend the rest of your hours gaming….

 

That’s what we did. We parked ourselves at OTK Genting (haha.. yeah there’s Old Town Kopitiam everywhere) and the early junkies started with their RACE FOR THE GALAXY.

 

 

A group soon converged on Battlestar Galactica and hope that a change of OTK location would help the Human’s pathetic OTK Cheras record against the Cylons.

 

 

This was one of the early Pegasus expansion play in Msia and with a few more new characters plus the Battlestar Pegasus in play, how did the humans fare?

 

 

Eerrmm…… redlining already?

 

 

Surrounded by enemies on all sides…. looked like the pathetic record continues…

 

 

Yet surprisingly… the Galactica led by Pegasus Commander Cain/Ken (above) managed to successfully made one final jump after reaching Kobol! All hail Cmd Ken!

 

Btw that dude sitting behind Ken (wolfx) was a Cylon! LOL

 

 

Elsewhere we saw AGE OF INDUSTRY (courtesy of Allen Sam) in play. AOI is to BRASS what Railways of the World is to Age of Steam.

 

 

LE HAVRE was at the other table. But without the new expansion LE GRAND HAMEAU.

 

 

Lastly we wanted to do DUNE but as the rules were sketchy and the night was getting to morning, we decided to call a good night to everyone. After all, the Humans did prevail in Galactica. Let us go to bed with such good memories….

 

This is what you get from our Retreat! A full day’s gaming from 9 am to 6 pm; Buffet Lunch (with generous helping of durians!), two coffee breaks with snacks, one BGC Retreat t-shirt and lots of friendly gamers to play with! Plus you also get a Retreat voucher worth 40% discount from our webstore (applicable to ALL games).

 

You might also want to read AyHeng’s report on this Retreat

 

 

BGC Boardgame Retreat Announcement (click here)

BGC Boardgame Retreat Photo Albums o Game Zero o Game One o Game Two o Game Three o After8 Gaming