Irene didn't take down our Power Grid

Hurricane"Tropical Storm" Irene was a bit of a non-event in my neck of the woods. No stories to tell.

But after Eli went to bed, the wife and I played a game of Power Grid.

Even though we always have fun playing with the default 2-player rules, I decided to give this 2-player variant a try.

The basic differences between the base rules and that variant are:
1) The market is split 3/5 instead of 4/4. Smaller current market, more futures.
2) Only 1 house per city, regardless of Step.
3) Only 2 regions in Step 1, adding 2 extra regions in Step 2 (which starts at 7 cities).
4) In Step 2, if you have 8 or more cities, you can power 3 fewer cities with your plants. In step 3, 6 fewer.
5) Game ends at 14 cities.

I actually enjoyed the tweaks it made; it adds some interesting situations, especially when Step 2 is beginning. I had 7 cities, and could power 10. But if I bought just one more city, I would only be able to power 7. And later in the game, you can't just sit on your power plants, you have to keep bidding.

She didn't like it, because it does add a bit of confusion for people who aren't "seasoned gamers"; the official rules of Power Grid with 2 players can be a very non-gamer-friendly casual game.
So maybe we won't play it again this way, but I might suggest it for a 2-player variant with another "gamer gamer".

On the other hand:
In the end, I did win, but it was still by a narrow margin. I'm not sure if the overhead added by the variant actually changes the situation very much except a little bit of twisting your perception. It might take a few more experimental games to formulate a full opinion.

Remote Gaming

Our D&D group is notoriously bad at consistently meeting.
It is something that happens when you grow up; schedules are incompatible, real life issues interfere, and it just has to take lower priority.
Throughout the last few years, we've struggled to meet once every 3 or 4 months on a Sunday night.

Due to this and other concerns, we decided to give it a try to use an online video chat service for one person to be remotely available. Our first guinea pig was not Mike (our friend who moved away), but me. Circumstances had me needing to stay home, but available for gaming.

We first tried Google Hangout, but the video was a little bit choppy (over wifi, at least) and it was wreaking havoc on my poor netbook's system resources.
I suggested we use Skype instead.
From my perspective, Skype was generating a clearer smoother picture and better audio... but for whatever reason it ended up crashing the machine on the other side.
So we went back to Google Hangout, and I resorted to getting out my incredibly-long-cat5-cable to plug the netbook into the wired network.
Had to work out some audio issues, but eventually it started working better, and we got used to it.. so, technologically, it was working OK.
Whether it will hold up with a 3rd or 4th person in conference is a whole other question, but we'll see.

As for the experience itself, I know I was fooling around with zooming in on random objects and making funny faces for a lot of the time, but that was just to make sure people still knew I was there. (It was also weird because my view of myself was mirror-flipped.. whooaaaa)

I also felt a little bit like I was watching a live event, and not participating, so there were times that I completely zoned out, did stuff in another window, and waited to hear my name.

But when I did hear my name, and when I was included, then I did feel like we accomplished something. I was more-or-less able to see the BattleMat and my character actually did kill some goblins and stuff. :)

So, conceptually, I approve. I think this can work.
Technically, I think we still have to figure out what the ideal setup is.

Hopefully, next time, I will be one of the people in the physical room, though.

Games Played With Josh, August 17th, 2011

Five people gathered at my house for boardgames last night, and we tried out my new game Glen More...

... naw, just kidding, we played Galactica.

We chose to play with New Caprica as a destination, using all the rest of the Pegasus and Exodus components.

The characters were:

Gaeta (Kristen) ->

Baltar (me) (Cylon) ->

Cally (Matt) ->

Apollo (Max) (Cylon)->

Tori (*and Anders) (Kevin)

Predictably, I was a Cylon from the very first turn.

As soon as I was able, I spiked a check with a yellow card, and balked about it publicly when there were 3 negatives in the check. I figured, Baltar's already a suspicious character so it is best to play to that early.

For the most part, I played as a nice friendly human, because Baltar always wants to live to the sleeper phase to use his OPG.

The humans had halfway decent luck before the sleeper phase, and we hit sleeper at Distance 5.

Gaeta at this point was Pradmiral, and Tori decided that she wanted to use Administration to make herself president, to improve her special ability, without consulting anyone.

This was definitely my "in".

On my first turn after that (my first turn after sleeper), I peeked at Tori's pair of Not-A-Cylons (one of which was a personal goal but I really wasn't interested in that).

I took advantage of the suspicion of her last action, and of course called out Kevin. "Oh, Kevin, how could you?"

Apparently, this was convincing enough for Cally, because she went right over to Tori's location and discharged her firearm, revealing my lie.

At this point, I should point out that we were using a slight variant on Executions.

Instead of choosing any new character, we shuffle up the non-dead characters and deal out 3, letting the player choose 1.

Kevin's choices were grim: Boomer, Helo, or Anders, the very 3 characters who have "screwed on the first turn" as a penalty. He chose the least of the evils, Anders.

I thought this might mean Cally was my partner in crime, but it didn't take long for me to find out that I was wrong. Apollo's followup action was to Reveal, damaging 2 areas of Galactica. Evilly and thematically enough, the two damaged areas were Command and the Hangar Deck, leaving no way for vipers to get out as Galactica was swarmed with Cylons on the outside.

On Gaeta's turn, he used an Arrest Order on me (which I had been holding on to before the title was unceremoniously taken away).

I used the Political Prowess that I'd been holding on to since the very beginning as a Get Out of Jail Free card, but unfortunately, the fates would give me a crisis that had the admiral choose to send me right back to the brig.

On my following turn, I would reveal, because my Reveal Power did not need any help -- move the Jump Track back 2 spaces, when there had been 5 crises in a row without a jump icon, including one that moved the track backwards.

Did I mention that by this point, all of the raiders were on the board, and 4 Centurions were marching?!

Skipping ahead a little bit.. the next jump was apparently a choice between 2 1-distance destinations, because it left us at distance 6.

By the time New Caprica was reached (and it was), both Population and Morale were at 1, and there were 3 Centurions 2 steps along on the track.

The humans conceded, rather than perform the futile setup of the New Caprica board.

So that makes my second game with New Cap, and I still haven't fully experienced the.. experience.

Fun game :)

I'll still play Glen More, I swear!

(BSG) Increasing Paranoia with Executions

I posted this over at BoardGameGeek, and unsurprisingly it wasn't a very popular idea.

So I'm thinking,
When I first heard about Exodus, and played my first couple of games with it, I liked the new rules for the Loyalty Deck partially because a character wasn't guaranteed to be Human when coming into the game to replace an Executed character.

But in practice, the newly-drawn card after being Executed is rarely "You Are A Cylon"; it might be a Final Five or a Personal Goal, but those don't really hurt the team that bad.

So here is my idea:

At game setup, create the Loyalty Deck as instructed by the Exodus rulebook. Follow the rules as-printed until the sleeper phase.

After the Sleeper Phase, the first time a character is executed, instead of shuffling a new You Are Not A Cylon card into the deck before drawing your new loyalty, shuffle a "You are a Late Cylon" card in.
(This could use a better name, but I don't even know if the mechanic's any good)

YOU ARE A CYLON

Action: Reveal this card.
You may not use the "Cylon Fleet" or "Basestar Bridge" location.

Only do this once. Future executions are handled by the normal rules.

It makes you a worse Cylon than the Sympathizer, for sure. It barely gives you an incentive to Reveal. But it adds more uncertainty to the Airlock As Cylon Detector, and maybe people will start using the Brig more often again?

What do you think?

It's a trap!

Oh neat, FFG has gotten the rights to make Star Wars games!
Could a Star Wars/BSG crossover be right around the corner?? [/just kidding]

Increasing realism in abstract eurogames, is it really necessary?

In my previous post, I commented that Glen More's wooden cubes leave a bit to be desired.

And Mayday Games has this set of nicer-looking cubes that match the GM resources.

The question I have is: Is it really worth $10 (plus shipping*) to replace the wood cubes in a game I will probably not play as often as I think I'll play it, for an aesthetic benefit that most people won't care about?

The funny afterthought to that question is: In what other games could I use these tokens?
Just to get some use out of the bits of wood, would I replace the BSG civilian ships with cattle? Power Grid uranium with sheep? ;)

Seriously, though, I'm thinking about it. But not until I actually get a chance to play a few times and see how annoying it really is.
(The legitimate argument for replacing Glen More's cubes is actually that they're a bit too small and may be hard to handle/easy to lose)

P.S. They also have this "mega-set" of meeples which would cover all of my eurogame needs for a long time, but I realy know I don't need that.

* side note, I wish I had thought of this sooner, because I just made a big order of Sleeves from them a few weeks ago, which would solve the shipping-cost question.

Glen Less

Last night's "PlayGamesWithJosh" did not happen in its traditional sense.
But my wife was free and wanted to play boardgames with me, so I grabbed up that opportunity.

I have been so excited to try out Glen More since I picked it up, I set it all up and started reviewing the rules.
Now, I am not the best game-explainer, but I started to go over things with her, and.. well, her eyes just glazed over with the complications.
Glen More seems to be one of those games where you can "just start playing and figure things out as you go", but there are still a lot of bits to point out.
Therefore, the game got vetoed before you could say "I sell my sheep".

So we packed that up and put it away. It will be a game for another time.
(Incidentally, the one thing I do want to say about Glen More is that I think I might need to pick up a pack of alternative wooden meeples to represent the resources. It does cause a bit of an immersion problem, not to mention the cubes being a little too small and lose-able).

So, Power Grid came out of the box instead.
We decided to try the Spain/Portugal map, with the basic deck (no promos).
Fairly straightforward.
The special rules for Spain/Portugal are easy to explain:
If you ONLY own cities in Portugal, then you are not allowed to bid on Nuclear Power Plants.

Now, especially in 2-player, this is pretty silly. You don't have to include Portugal as one of the available regions, (not even with 6 players). Granted, it has some cheap connections, but we really only chose Portugal so we could see how it affected the whole game.
But also, by the time you are interested in nuclear power plants, I'm not sure anybody would be exclusively settling in Portugal, except for a particularly nasty cornering scenario with more players. I think this rule really has zero effect.

3 of the mid-range Wind Plants (18, 22, and 27) are removed from the deck, and placed back on top of the deck in order at the start of Step 2

I'm not sure of the justification of this rule, except to slow down access to the bigger nuclear plants in the mid-game when they are most powerful. By this time, these 3 wind plants aren't extremely desirable.

Uranium replenishes zero during Step 1.
Not so much a "special rule", but notable to the other 2 points. It starts out cheap but doesn't replenish during step 1, and replenishes best during step 2.

Overall, I think that even with more players, Spain/Portugal is kind of "meh" and doesn't change enough from the basic map that I'd really be enthusiastic about trying it again.

I really want to try out the Korea map, because it seems to have the most interesting effect on the rules (2 different markets). Maybe next time...