![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Another Sunday night, another boardgame gets a whirl. We gave ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
alaimacerc's Funkenschlag a try-out, if only to make his carting it over to our place worthwhile.
We, as perhaps to be expected, got nowhere near a full game, and just played to 7 connected cities. This still took us about 2 hours as we had a lot of false starts with learning (and applying) the rules. I can't see it ever finishing in two hours for the full game, even if we were far more used to the rules and flow of play.
We chose the USA map, dropped the East Coast and got started.irishkate staked out the West Coast, while the rest of us grabbed starting points in the mid-lands and the South. By the luck of the draw, coal was by far the favoured raw material and we drove the price of coal up quickly. Oil stayed cheap throughout however, and would have been a bargain if I'd managed to get a half-decent oil-fired plant.
As we hit 7 cities I was a plank and misunderstood the phase 1 end conditions, thinking that I'd score for all my 7 cities, not remembering that they had to be powered, and I was seduced by a nice wind powered plant that only left me with enough power to run 6 six cities. That was me out of the running.
Final scores wereirishkate 7 cities powered, $102, alaimacerc 7 cities powered, $92, mylescorcoran 6 cities powered, $85 and sammywol 6 cities powered, $73.
An interesting game but too long for our group, and one that didn't really appeal to eithersammywol or irishkate. I doubt it will get a replay soon. Ah well.
alaimacerc's Funkenschlag a try-out, if only to make his carting it over to our place worthwhile. We, as perhaps to be expected, got nowhere near a full game, and just played to 7 connected cities. This still took us about 2 hours as we had a lot of false starts with learning (and applying) the rules. I can't see it ever finishing in two hours for the full game, even if we were far more used to the rules and flow of play.
We chose the USA map, dropped the East Coast and got started.
irishkate staked out the West Coast, while the rest of us grabbed starting points in the mid-lands and the South. By the luck of the draw, coal was by far the favoured raw material and we drove the price of coal up quickly. Oil stayed cheap throughout however, and would have been a bargain if I'd managed to get a half-decent oil-fired plant. As we hit 7 cities I was a plank and misunderstood the phase 1 end conditions, thinking that I'd score for all my 7 cities, not remembering that they had to be powered, and I was seduced by a nice wind powered plant that only left me with enough power to run 6 six cities. That was me out of the running.
Final scores were
irishkate 7 cities powered, $102, alaimacerc 7 cities powered, $92, mylescorcoran 6 cities powered, $85 and sammywol 6 cities powered, $73.An interesting game but too long for our group, and one that didn't really appeal to either
sammywol or irishkate. I doubt it will get a replay soon. Ah well.
(no subject)
This may well be the case, but I feel that my family-style group are not going to be playing 1856 and the like any time soon, so Power Grid is an example of the outlying crunchier games that they're happy to play (others include Puerto Rico, Agricola, Railroad Tycoon; I'm really hoping that Martin Wallace's new Steam from Mayfair will be friendly enough to them that I can prompt them to play that rather than RT, under the assumption that it will deliver more of the Age of Steam type experience I like: in short, I hope it's as to AoS as PG is reputed to be to F).
(no subject)
Which is strange in some ways, as Puerto Rico is pretty popular and it's pretty damn fiddly in most respects.
I've only played one of the 18xx series and I can't recall which one but have the vague memory that it would too crunchy for our group too.
(no subject)
18xx would be vastly too long and crunchy for that group. I've played a two-player scenario of one of the "units" of 1825, the noddy version of the noddier sub-family of the 18xx games (i.e. it's a spinoff of 1829, not of 1830), and it was still pretty long and brain-boggling. (You'll have noticed I haven't been bringing that one over, even in my uttermost speculations.)
My understanding of the new edition of AoS is that it's just throwing in a bonus board, fixing printing errors, etc, etc, not making very significant rules or configuration revisions. I'll have to scrutinise the 'Geek to see if it has a canonical list of changes -- if that would even be meaningful, given my hazy recollection of the earlier edition. I doubt it's realistically doable with that group, either. (Though a subset of us did give it a go in days of yore, or more specifically, of Ken.) Still thinking about blowing 40-50 quid on it anyway, though.
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
One comment last night was on whether there was a "sweep" rule (on the pattern of TtR's "three locos => toss this utter yarborough"). Which there is to an extent, but it's a "sweep by inches". I'm sure there are ways to "rig" the market further, though since there are already by my count five different "adjust the market" sub-steps, adding more would be piling on the cognitive overload a bit more. (Or, the player-aid fiendishness.)
(no subject)
I mean, there are more or less three sweep rules (nobody buys, biggest plant, city ct > plant cost -- and we missed that last on our first play), but stalling on plants can still happen.
(no subject)
(no subject)
Kudos to IK on skillful "playing to the whistle". (Unlike me, who'd clearly over-invested in both plants and fuel, given where we were stopping. Not to mention further catapulting the meeple as regards the coal supply/demand.) You'd think crushing us all would have sold her on the game at least a little bit, but I guess with that Beginner's Luck Gene of hers, she's taking it for granted at this point. :)
(no subject)