Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Welcome to the Cardstock Crucible

If you are reading this, then I must have successfully drugged you or at least appealed to your underdeveloped sense of pity; lucky me! This blog is intended to be a venue for exposing new game ideas whether they be alterations, modifications or new rule sets. I encourage you to add your thoughts and/or speak up if you would like to try any of the new prototypes I plan on putting together. This is, of course, also a clear New Year's Resolution for me to focus more energy on my board gaming and hold myself accountable for writing down my game related thoughts. The site is not public but if you have a friend that would enjoy getting in on the fun just have them email me. You know my email address. : ) Hope you enjoy the ramblings and with any luck the lustrous nuggets of games to be.
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  1. LMAJanuary 2, 2009 at 2:35 PM

    Hi Jowens, and Happy New Year! Great to finally hear from you -- hope all is well in .... SNOWY .... Portland! My Magic Snowblower Investment is still working perfectly at making sure not a flake falls here in Maryland. ;D

    Onto gaming ... played a new game yesterday for the New Year -- Rails of Europe, the new board for (defunct) Eagle Games' Railroad Tycoon. It was ... interesting, which of course means I lost miserably. Peter and Robert were actually tied in Victory Points *and* money at the end of the game, but since Robert had less shares we called the win for him. Obviously more plays are required (like RR Tycoon, it takes 2-3 hours to complete a game) before I can make real conclusions, but right now my main criticism would be of three new cards in the deck. These give the holder complete control of a given city in the middle of Europe -- once held, no one else can build into or out of that city. This seemed to me to be far too powerful as I fell victim to one of them mid-game when Alan claimed it, and it completely decimated the routes I'd been building up to that point. With four players, so many other routes were tied up that it was too late to recover with another strategy. We also saw a problem with the few Red and Yellow cities on the board -- they are on the far east and far west of the map, with the result being that it wasn't cost effective for anyone to build a network reaching all the way to Moscow, say, and move the red cubes in Spain or even Germany across the mountains. I'll report more once we play more.

    For the last game of last year, we played Formula D: Monaco, which gives you the chance to play with everyone of the standard polyhedral dice while at the same time, making "brrmmm, brrmmm" engine noises with your lips. Need I say more? A great time was had by all. :D

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