Boardgamecafe.net Meetup Report @ Old Town Kopitiam Cheras 2/10/2015– BARONY, ROLL FOR THE GALAXY
By ayheng

EXCERPT
While the BoardgameCafe.net crew is away at Essen for SPIEL 2015, some OTK regulars met up at our previous meetup venue OLD TOWN KOPITIAM Cheras for a night of Barony and Galaxy Rolling…. read on to find out their impressions of these two games.

The night started with a two player game of Barony between Ivan and Heng

This game have serious component overproduction issues

Modular setup tiles

Game action summary card

Victory Points tracker

Control Points tiles

This game is sort of like chess where positioning and area control matters.

This is more so in our two player game as each move is met immediately by a countermove.

Castles, Fortresses and Mountains form up choke points and defensive barriers.

Villages give control points to convert to Victory Points. However the catch is that villages can be razed by the opponent to steal those control points from you.

The challenge is then to time the conversion and also to position those villages in more defensible territory.

As the game is deterministic (no random elements), the thinky and analysis paralysis can get quite bad. However it does reward repeated plays and there are many strategies that a veteran can employ against a beginner.

Next we are joined by Vence for Roll for the Galaxy (RollFTG)!

from left: Heng, Vence, Ivan. You can see Sinbad’s gang in the background doing other games. 

Race for the Galaxy (RaceFTG) is one of my favourite games, but I always felt the teaching time is too long and unnecessarily complex.

So how does RollFTG fare as an apparently shorter dice variant of RaceFTG?

First off – the dice now acts as the resource of the game, so no more huge hand of cards as resources, instead, it is better to get as many dice as possible in this game.

The explore option works differently in that new developments and worlds revealed go to the bottom of your stack and only the top can be worked on.

This is a massive change from RaceFTG as previously you will have a massive hand to pick and choose which tech or world to work on. So RollFTG although won’t confuse new players as much with too many options, does feel constricting to a RaceFTG player.

The other major change for the better is to combine trade and consume into the same action called shipping.

Leeching off other player’s actions is still a mainstay of RollFTG, however this time, in order to leech effectively, you have to commit dice resources to those actions that you think the other players will play. This is where the more dice you have the better as you have more dice to ‘guess’ where the other players will go and as an added bonus, mitigate the luck of the die roll.

sturdy dice cup

the colourful dice!

player board

player screen cum rules summary

action selection board

game credit marker

player action selection indicator

Player starting world plus specialisation (yup, you start with 3 development/world on tableau)

allocating dice

gaming @ Old Town Whitecoffee = getting fat

So what do I think of the game? RollFTG seems to be more streamlined and easier to teach, however the limited exploration option gives the game a different character from RaceFTG. I’ll have to try it a few more times and with different player count. At this point in time, RollFTG does seem to be able to coexists with RaceFTG but definitely RollFTG will be my choice to teach to newbies.

For more photos of boardgaming session, visit our Facebook Album.
For more boardgaming reports, visit our Boardgamecafe.net Blog.

To discuss this gaming session, join us in our Facebook Page.
To buy the games played in this meetup, please visit our Web Store.

We carry over 1,000+ games and provide prompt and free delivery to anywhere in Malaysia. Min order applies for free delivery. If you are a retail store looking to sell boardgames, you are most welcome to get in touch with us.

Find out how you can buy games, earn points and redeem for special promos thru BGC Points.