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November 29, 2003
Return of the Bride of TurkeyCon 2003
Fun continued. More guests arrived, and so larger games were brought out, and PitchCar was again played, with 7 players to crowd the field. Lou is quite good at this game, and I need to learn to stop trying to be fancy and just take the straightforward shot when it's available.
Warcraft didn't quite make the grade... Not a bad game, but the bits are insufficiently evocative of the source and play needs to go on too long past the point where the eventual winner is obvious. Some rather odd things happened to all but collapse the Human/Elf alliance and let the Orc/Undead side pretty much dominate the board. A few house rules (lowering the VP requirement and/or making home-region resources more durable, perhaps by requiring them to deplete 4 times before emptying rather than 2 or even making them immune to depletion, as is done in several scenarios) would probably patch things a bit, as would an expansion set that further differentiates the 4 armies. Also, while the icons used on all play pieces and cards are nicely evocative of the Warcraft look, they aren't always clear and are pretty much never intuitive. A half-dozen words to summarize the rules effects would prevent constant references to the back page of the rulebook.
Puerto Rico, though, was every bit as good to play as it looked on paper. All players are constantly involved, and player choice determines the order of phases, so one part of the game is trying to manipulate the situation so someone else will select the phase you need. Multiple strategies can work (and limited copies of each building force players to adopt unique strategies anyway). There's a lot to learn before you start, but it's mostly a bunch of fairly simple individual rules and so not too overwhelming (and the rules cues on the player mats are excellent). It won't appeal to non-gamers much at all due to its very mechanical abstractions, but it's replay value is fantastic for those who love games.
We also managed some time to make the damn fool mistake of going shopping on "Black Friday". This was available at a 20% discount, and I really did want the old-school Zelda games, so made a deal to split the price with Lou and Julia, who didn't already own a GameCube. What we failed to account for is just how frightening a Wal*Mart can be at 7 AM the day after Thanksgiving.
Also, Julia finished Paladin of Souls, so discussing it is now allowed. I suspect that may take up a bit of the drive back on Monday.
Today, there are more games on tap, including (I hope) this year's Games 100 top choice, New England.
Posted by ghoul at November 29, 2003 07:55 AM
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