Danger Planet session. 3-player Pirateer, 3-player Siesta, 6-player Sands of Time (prototype).
Players were Cindy, Karl, myself. New players to the game were: Cindy, myself. Cindy had the first turn.
We spent 5 minutes going over the rules and setting up the game.
Pirateer is a dice-rolling game with a pirating theme. The game board is a grid with an island in the center containing gold, and a harbor at each corner acting as an obstacle course. The grid is on a diagonal, and two corners wrap-around the game board. Also, there are trade-winds that allow travel along the diagonal.
Each player starts with three ships in their harbors. The goal is to reach the island to get the gold and return to the harbor. Ships may land on another ship and sink them. This is how to get the gold from another ship. (There's only one gold piece on the island.) Two dice are rolled, and one or two ships are moved the exact number of spaces shown on each die.
Karl started out with bad rolls, so he couldn't even leave the harbor. Cindy started out with good rolls, and reached the island to get the gold first. I was able to reach her at the mouth of her harbor, but we ended up with bad rolls, enough for Karl to catch up to us. A few ships were sunk, but Cindy was able to reach her goal.
This game is extremely light. Karl says there are many variants to the game. This is good because the game is not very engaging, but made for a good filler. An additional benefit of this game is that it legitimizes saying "Arrr!" in a gruff voice repeatedly in a social setting.
Game lasted 17 minutes. Final scores were:
Click here to buy Pirateer at FunAgain.com.
Click here to learn more about Pirateer at BoardGameGeek.com.
Players were Cindy, Karl, myself. I had the first turn.
We spent 2 minutes going over the rules and setting up the game.
This time, I started way in the corner. This made for patterns that we haven't seen before (as opposed to a lot of suns along a diagonal.) Each of us made some impressive moves because the previous players didn't catch the potential set-up, so all our scores turned out fairly close.
Game lasted 16 minutes. Final scores were:
Click here to buy Siesta at FunAgain.com.
Click here to learn more about Siesta at BoardGameGeek.com.
Players were Chris, Matt, Rich, Jeff, Tony, myself. New players to the game were: Chris, Matt, Rich, Tony, myself. Jeff had the first turn.
We spent 39 minutes going over the rules and setting up the game.
Jeff developed this game intended to be a Civilization-lite game.
I guess the interesting concepts of the game, without giving too much away, are the character role cards that add or enhance abilities in each phase, dealt out based on the number of territories owned. Tactics cards that can only be obtained with a character role and enhance battle opportunities. Attrition which reduces to one or zero anything you obtained that turn and didn't use. The map is a circular projection of the Mediterranean, which balanced the connections between territories. Scoring is done during scoring rounds in the areas of population, military, civic and wealth.
This is the game I showed up for this time. We arranged to play it in email ahead of time. I was eager to try a quicker Civilization game and I wasn't disappointed. I was pleasantly surprised, in fact, with the quality of the components and the refined concepts of the game.
I jumped into a military strategy right off, because I had the roles for it. Even though neighboring players felt threatened, Chris actually made less points though he could have done better if he expanded more, and Tony had many civic roles which he used to boost his score in that area.
The game was very engaging, even though we played four of the eight rounds of the game.
I hope this game gets developed more -- or rather gets tweaked to balance game-play because I'd like to play it again. Jeff did a great job on the prototype and it certainly had a feel that it was close to finished.
Game lasted 147 minutes. Final scores were:
