Visiting doctor_atomic

[prog]

So the vacation last weekend was great. The train trips to and from New Jersey were uneventful, comfortable, and not overly long. I like the train.

It was so nice to spend a lot of non-thon time with doctor_atomic, which I haven't really done since we were housemates four years ago. As she's usually completely consumed in her research, my arrival made her quite game-hungry, so we played plenty of games. Besides being fun, this had the additional effect of rekindling my interest in games. I hadn't noted it here, but it had been somewhat on the wane and needed a kick. It's less the games themselves as it is my approach to them that's been getting stale, but this is a blog for another time.

We played Cribbage twice, including once at a bar, which is pretty cool coz it was originally invented as a pub-friendly passtime, y'know, and I hadn't played in that sort of venue before. After I giddily toasted to the spirit of Sir John Suckling, its inventor, the bartender asked us what we were playing and I told her. Sadly. She let me get about four sentences in to excitedly explaining the game's English origins and American traditions before saying "Ha ha I'll have to learn that!" and then fleeing. I thought of so-and-so's comment of Ahh, I see, I am informing you against your will from last week's This American Life about the mystery hunt, but really she had drinks to pour too. She got a nice tip from me.

The doctor is slightly but consistently better than me at games. She beat me at both Cribbages, and we also played the Settlers card game once, which I fought like hell to just-barely win despite her never having played before. Uh, and we finished a game of Babel, a Kosmos two-player game that you haven't heard of because it's not necessarily all that good. It was significant to us personally because she bought it when we lived together and the one time we tried to play it she fell asleep, and it's sat inert in her game bin ever since. (I'd like to play it again, actually, but I doubt I'd want to buy it. It's neither broken nor particularly elegant.)

Other than that we made walking and driving treks around the New Brunswicky area to find interesting shops she'd heard about, and while we failed every time (Google maps WTF?) we succeeded in finding other interesting stuff. We ate and drank at various places. We took up no less than three tables when playing the Settlers card game at a cafe full of Rutgersians that we happened across. (I had forgotten the ridiculous amount of real estate that game demands.) I think people were looking sideways at us and wondering what we were doing, but we were gossiping most rudely about them too, so all was well.

And we ate approx. 400 cookies that the doctor made on my arrival. The end.

Comments

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

cooookies.

sounds like a nice trip.

[doctor-atomic.livejournal.com]

I've been meaning to post about this, but you summed it up well enough! :)

Come and visit me any time!

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Babel is my favorite of the Kosmos 2-player line, and in my top-five list of 2-player games. I can see why it wouldn't be considered elegant but I think it has its own internal logic. I get kinda bored with too-elegant games anyway.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Interesting!

The wacky thing about the game, after one play, is that you'd expect all the tribes to be more or less equivalent, when in fact the Assyrians seem to trump everything. I found myself adjusting my gameplay on every turn to either set up an Assyrian attack, prevent my opponent from using her Assyrians, or minimizing future Assyrian damage to me.

That doesn't mean it was a bad game; it seemed playable once we leaned how the world works. But we couldn't shake the feeling that the game wasn't originally designed to have a single scary trump-suit like that.

If the game were called "OMG Assyrians!!! :(" and was themed around four ancient tribes who band together to build temples in the face of relentless assaults by a fifth, I may have found the game simply fun with no complaints.

[luckylefty.livejournal.com]

Assyrians aren't nearly as powerful as they seem at first. Is it possible you missed the rule that I missed at first? When you destroy a temple with the Assyrians, you take the destroyed temple, turn it upside down as a stack, and put it on the top of the deck. This means that when you destroy my temple, then at the end of your turn, you'll put the 1 and 2 from that temple on your "available temple levels" pile, and I'll start my next turn rebuilding these levels. Then at the end of my turn, I'll put the 3 and 4 on my "available temple levels" pile, and if you're not able to use these on your turn, I can build them, too, and the 5 and 6 you will draw at the end of your turn, and I'll have rebuilt my full temple.

Assyrians are especially powerful against temples built using Hittites, but that's needed to balance the Hittite power a bit.

The most important effect of the Assyrians is the possibility of them causing a sudden victory. If you have a 6 temple, you have to be careful about entering phase II, lest you be knocked down from 15 to 9 and lose. But this danger can be avoided by staying at 14 until you can go to 16 or more.

I've played this a lot, and have done pretty well, and if there's any imbalance among the races, I think it's the Sumerians that are too powerful. Card denial can be a powerful strategy.

[prog.livejournal.com]

We got the rule. I note that you just spent three turns to rebuild a temple I smashed in one, and that's if I didn't use any of those tiles myself. And I'll probably just smash your temple a second time, won't I?

The most viable strategy we found after one game involves spreading out construction across the five spaces. Any temple that rose too tall generally got pulled down the next turn.

[luckylefty.livejournal.com]

Of those three turns, the middle one is your turn, so the temple is rebuilt after two of my turns. But the point is that it doesn't "use up" those turns; in addition to rebuilding my temple, I can still do whatever else I was going to do on those turns. So after those two turns, you have spent a card to knock my temple down, and I have rebuilt it without spending a card, so your effort using Assyrians has lost you a card and gained you nothing.

You say "if I didn't use one of those tiles myself", but the point is that you have exactly one chance to use one of these tiles. So yes, if you use Assyrians to knock down a large temple in a situation where you are able to use a 3 on the following turn, that can be useful. But that limits their power quite a bit.

I think that what happened is that the game didn't match your expectations; you expected the temples to grow steadily, where actually they fluctuate fairly radically. The thing that grows steadily is your workforce. If I have a larger and well-organized workforce (meaning one where it's easy to create and move 3's through migration), I can overcome a substantial deficit in temple levels, given time. The interesting decisions are whether to build a well-organized workforce, or to opportunistically grab the useful temple levels, which are a useful but transient gain. If you can quickly push your temple levels all the way to a win, you win; if not, my better workforce will eventually triumph.

As to imbalance, I'd happily play for high stakes where your starting hand had 2 Assyrians and 3 random cards while mine had 2 Sumerians and 3 random cards.