Report time! Good weekend was had, many games played.
Friday:
Rise of Augustus (3 players)
Dice Town (6 [more than recommended])
Ticket to Ride (6, 2v2v2)
Battlestar Galactica Express (5)
Rise of Augustus (4)
Saturday:
Twilight Imperium 3 (4)
Glory to Rome (4)
Rise of Augustus (4)
Corporate America (4)
Sunday:
City Council (4)
I had never played any of these games previously… I’ll quickly summarize my feels on each in case anyone is looking for for more games to try.
Rise of Augustus
You may have noticed we played this fairly often, for good reason. It’s short (30 mins), fun and easy to learn and play. It’s a gateway game and a good one at that, excellent for people not really that in games.
The objective is to fill symbols on and complete your Senator or Region cards by matching them to symbols drawn out of the bag randomly (like bingo I guess).
Each card also has some kind of bonus or malicious act to help your progress or slow others.
The art work is also very nice and we would often jest about the appearance of the Senator cards.
The game has no scaling with different player counts and plays equally as well even with just 3.
Recommended for anyone, I will buy for myself.
Dice Town
This game has a lot of steps and rules with order and play but is relatively quick to learn. Good fun Wild West setting and quite a malicious game for making enemies for the rest of the night.
It is based on poker hands and you need a bit of luck as the best hands decide which part of town you visit. The town sites let you collect cash (toward re-rolling and VP), gold (VP), land (VP) and various other bonuses including becoming Sheriff… but if you miss out (crappy hand) you get to chose a play from Doc Badluck at the end which is usually an act of theft. Sheriff decides between tied rolls and this can get a bit heated!
Loved it, I’m considering buying. It’s a lot of fun even with more players than they recommend.
I think a little too difficult for non-gamers but if they like poker and the western theme they will enjoy.
Ticket to Ride
Super easy game to play and learn with lots of decision making.
Basically you are all trying to connect train routes across the board to earn the points for completing those routes.
We played Team Asia expansion board which I highly recommend. You have some shared tickets and communal carriages between but you cannot see your team mates cards or suggest moves for them to make. ‘Light table talk’ only.
Each game is different and there are plenty of game boards and alternate mechanics which keep it fresh.
Easy to play but almost too easy. I enjoyed our one game and I’d play it again anytime but honestly I’m not hanging out for it or rushing out to buy just yet.
Accessible and recommended for anyone.
Battlestar Galactica Express
This is a free (to print yourself) game that is a condensed version of the original Battlestar board game (which can take many hours to play)… but it looks like it has recently changed names to [b]Dark Moon[/b] for licencing reasons.
It is a cooperative game where you must try to defend your crew and ship against enemy attack (Cylon in BSG version) and warp out successfully to win.
Basically each turn a player decides what action do (defend, attack, repair, power warp etc) and each other players may offer their help by rolling dice (in secret) and placing one of their chosen values into play. Once a dice is played it stays out for the next roll so you may elect to sit out.
The reason you roll in secret is because some players on board are actually a Cylon disguise and try to sabotage the ship by play off unhelpful dice as a ‘bad roll’. You need to be subtle about it as not to raise suspicion and everyone votes you to be locked up!
Very often a genuinely poor roller becomes accused of Cylon and is incorrectly voted to be locked up.
It’s extremely difficult to win even without Cylon on board but having that extra level of difficulty and suspicion is a lot of fun. Be careful who you suspect! It can get heated.
I was Cylon undetected and we lost the game… which makes me the winner. 
Difficult game with plenty of player choice but recommended for any sci-fi fans. The secrecy and accusations is a lot of fun. It feels like a frustratingly impossible battle and tempers flare and fingers point but it is a short struggle; I highly doubt I would want to endure ~4 hours of the same with the official BSG version.
Will try to print a copy of Dark Moon if I can.
Twilight Imperium 3
Big daddy of board games, this game is almost the sole reason why the games weekend was had.
24 hours was a slight over exaggeration - it was more like 7 hours - but it does take many more hours for the owner to get a grasp of the rules and how to set up before you can teach others how to play.
I would not recommend playing it for the first time without a group read of the rules and a discussion session and sorting out all cards and things properly.
The game, however daunting it may seem, is so damn good and actually surprisingly intuitive. A lot of the of the rules are ifs and buts that you will ask yourself during the game but there are plenty of cross check reference cards to help.
If you didn’t gather from the picture, it’s a space battle game where you attempt to expand your influence from your home planet to others around the game board.
Each player is handed a few races which they elect one to play. Each race has different racial abilities, tech, unit costing and other unique traits.
Sectors (the hexes) are dealt out before the game and you piece the board together turn by turn.
Basically you start from your home planet/base and explore and attempt to capture as many planets or trade stations as possible. Planets sometimes include points to build more units or increase your political influence during votes and trade stations earn goods to spend on new units.
Ultimately you need to work toward a secret bonus objectives (EG, hold certain number of planets with the same resource) and earn community victory points to win (eg. Have 10 spare planetory resources after a round for 1 VP).
Moving onto unoccupied planets and empty space always reveal something, usually enemy units to defeat but sometimes bonuses or negative effects. One of the planets I attempted to capture was radiated and killed all my landing units without a battle. Ouch.
Trying to do this with other players to worry about = so much fun.
Battles are done by 10 sided dice roll but combined with tech trees and unit management, skills and racial ability, battles become so much more involved than just the random bloodbath of games like Risk.
This game is very heavy, Certainly not for everyone. But it plays so well and every game would be so different.
I love it… but where to find time and friends to play? Who knows.
Glory to Rome
This is a complicated but impressive mechanic card game based around building structures for yourself for the gains they provide.
The aim is to use different skills (Architect, Labourer etc) to collect materials from the communal pool which you then use to build different buildings with the correct materials… provided you have the correct skill to do so.
Skills, Building Type and Materials are all shared across the same card so it becomes skill to manage your hands. It has a very clever way to handle multiple uses with the same card.
I didn’t particularly enjoy this game at first but we played it twice and I am intrigued with it’s mechanic and would play again. I found too often it would snowball for certain players without any way for you to stop their progess (ie, no malitious actions). I think you need to play aggressive and push for end game before snowballing happens.
I only recommend this if you really like complex and clever card games. One for the seasoned gamer only.
Great visual design and very pretty visuals.
Corporate America
This was a great game to play late at night after a few drinks.
It simulates business ownership, profit and the lobbying system of the American Government in a very humerous way.
During the Wall Street phase, each player spends their money to invest in a few businesses (with very humorous names). The next phase cards are drawn showing certain types of businesses that have profited (eg, Finance, Media, Luxury etc). Players with those businesses earn money, sometimes exponentially, depending on which businesses they own.
Next follows the Campaign train in which political policies are revealed (and occasionally, protests from different lobbyists). This is where the fun begins! Each player must campaign to the other players which bills should be passed and why they should be elected president. Some of these bills harm or benefit particular business owners.
After some discussion, bidding begins where players nominate who they would like to see as president by spending money on their campaign. After three rounds the player with the richest campaign is elected president.
The president must then chose which 3 bills are passed the only requirement being to satisfy the protesters but not necessarily to adhere any promises made to other players on the campaign trail! Good luck getting elected for a second term next round, though.
And it continues. Each time with more laws and fines in place.
So much fun.
Simple, easy, entertaining.
Recommended if you enjoy some banter and pissing off your friends.
and finally…
City Council
This one is interesting.
The objective is to expand a city collectively and keep all your citizens employed without dragging the city into a smog and crime filled dump. Too much crime and smog and everyone loses.
As usual, there are individual objective cards for Victory points and they each have bonuses toward more difficult objectives if you are brave to claim later (eg, build fire department or police station for 1 point OR, build both for +2 points)
It is REALLY hard to build a functioning city especially on first try but it was good fun trying to fix it. We all managed to wrangle VP from the mess and finish the game without losing.
There is lots of voting and decision making to be made and you can often manipulate the results to aid your objective cards quite convincingly.
I’m looking forward to playing this one again. There are some more confusing mechanics when it comes to managing electricity and upgrading buildings but I think almost anyone could provided someone was there to help show where the problems lie and how each building works. Looks great, too.
