...or, Adventures in Waltham, Massachusetts' Dark Underbelly of Nerd Subcultures
...or, Auctions Away!
Once I heard that the local game store one town over had regular game nights once a week, it sounded like a marriage made in heaven: I get to fulfill my Coolidge-like game whoredom (Vim might explain, since he first applied the apocryphal story to me), and also possibly meet people I'd want to hang out with on a friendlier level.
Well, I'll still go every week, but so far I'm striking out on the friend front. In fact, the single person who I had the most rapport with that night was the tweener son of the manager on duty, who was playing Vegas Showdown with us. It just seemed the gamers who came that night were a fairly insular bunch. We'll see if I meet anyone else or crack that social anxiety.
However, I learned a few games:
1. Ra, which i had already owned but hadn't played yet. It's an auction game, with extremely simple rules to learn intitially but a somewhat complex scoring system.
It goes like this: a mess o' tiles, representing various facets of ancient Egyptian life, are in a bag and on your turn you have two options:
- Pull another tile out of the bag and add it to an ever-increasing lot of tiles up for bidding.
- Call "Ra" (start an auction).
The trick is that each player gets a few FIXED bids (you see one of the wooden bid markers in the linked picture); you can't increase your bid once you've played it. The winning bid is placed in the middle of the board and is also included in the winnings of the *next* auction. So players are winning each other's bids with each auction lot.
That's the game, in a nutshell -- the rest is all the scoring mechanism. Some tiles only count for the particular round you're playing; some only count at the end of the game, and only if you've got multiples, or a set of different tiles; some count but only if you've got a certain specific tile to begin the set; some count immediately.
The scoring mechanism makes what would ordinarily be a tension-filled (but one-dimensional) auction game -- think the power plant auction in Power Grid -- into a much more strategic game, since you're weighing the benefit the lot of tiles means to you versus the benefit to someone else, on a couple of different levels.
Interesting. As usual, I would definitely play again. And very strangely, I won narrowly, against expert players.
2. Vegas Showdown, which on its face is a 'casino building sim' kind of game, but at its root is just another multi-dimensional auction game. Paradoxically, although there are a few more things to keep track of and "game business" to manage up front, I actually found it easier to learn than Ra, and therefore more fun initially. Not to disparage Ra, since I think both games are very good but appeal to different gamer instincts -- Ra is simply a more cerebral game, whereas VS definitely has a more in-your-face competitiveness feel.
Anyway, there is a dwindling supply of tiles representing casino "rooms" that confer 1 of 3 benefits for the buyer, or some combination of the three:
- Generate income
- Bring in increased foot traffic
- Generate fame (largest fame points wins the game).
Several interesting things about this game in particular:
- Prices for rooms drop each time the turn passes to the next player - so the big strategy of the game lies in *when* to spend your money. Do you pay more up front now, or wait until you have more money later but risk getting into a bidding war with someone who also desperately wants that room?
- There is actually a Tetris spatial element to the game, since bonus points (which sometimes can decide the game, Ticket to Ride-style) are awarded for various things, such as whether you've entirely filled up your casino or hotel area with rooms, whether you've got a single continuous path through your casino, or whether you've got the highest income or foot traffic.
- The game has a nice way of constantly reminding players of what to do when it's their turn, via an "active player" button that gets passed around the table, with the turn sequence preprinted on it. Therefore you learn the game quicker than just constantly referring to a single rulebook.
- The game comes with several colors of plastic poker chips to use as money; however, a game like this positively SCREAMS for you to go out and get the real, heavier, clay poker chips.
A while back I cajoled Mudge into getting this game for himself, since I didn't have it myself, didn't have a real interest in getting it, but had heard it was reasonably well-regarded and fun to play. At first I was afraid I'd snookered Mudge into getting something that was a bit obtuse, since we cracked it one night and rejected it in favor of something else. However, I'm glad to say that this game is damn fine.
3. High Society, which is an extremely simple card (and auction) game that takes around 20 minutes to play. You get a fixed number of money cards -- one or more can be used to bid on a single card that gets turned up from the deck, of value 1 to 10, or a multiplier.
The catch here is that occasionally there are "bad" cards that turn up, such as a thief (which negates a positive card of your choice), or a half multipier card, etc. that the players are *forced* to enter into a game of 'auction chicken' for -- the first person to drop out of the auction wins the shitty card.
So, with a fixed number of money cards and the ability to put down more than one card in a bid, you can overspend yourself mighty quickly. Most games actually end with a few people having 0 cash and a winning score of less than 20.
Quite fun -- since it comes in a small box and is a very light game to begin with, I may get this sometime.
4. Bananagrams - basically speed Scrabble, where other players are forced to draw more letter tiles once one player has used all his tiles in a legal impromptu crossword puzzle. The winner is decided when the other players can't draw any more tiles from the supply once they're forced to draw.
I've always sucked at this, but at least it comes in a banana bag.
