I brought 3 games for the Prize Table

-Whiskey Race from JKLM Games

-Kunst Stucke

-Thebes (in shrink)

Should be solid items.

Three Games Played:

Stone Age - 

Fairly interesting new Hans Im Gluck game that plays 2-4.  Think Pillars of the Earth with dice and you have some of the flavor.  Each player starts with 5 guys whom they can assign in turn order to various places on the board.  You start with 12 food and must feed each of your people at the end of each round, so one of the areas to obtain stuff is FOOD.  There are also raw materials (only 7 spots available for each in a round), Agriculture which lessens your food burden by 1 each time you take it, Birth so you get another guy, Tools which help with die rolls, cards that cost resources, but give immediate and end-game scoring benefits, and tiles that allow you to turn in various groupings of resources for points.

For resources and food you must roll a die for each person you place in that area.  THEN you divide your total roll by a number.  For example, you roll a 10 for food and divide by 2, getting 5 food.  Or you roll a 17 for gold, add a +1 tool to get it to 18, then divide by 6 to earn 3 gold.

The cards give food, point, resource benefits, or have a nice mechanism where everyone gets something from a die roll.  The cards also have multipliers for end-game scoring depending on how many cards, tiles, guys, etc. that you have collected.

It moves along, but seemed to take longer than the game itself warranted.  BUT that's with a full compliment of players ANd all by one as newbies.

Ticket to Ride Nordic-

This one plays ONLY 2-3 players and is just WICKED!  According to the designer himself all double routes - even when playing with 3 players - can only have one of the routes filled.  Needless to say, I wound up with NEGATIVE 15 points on tickets by the end.  BRUTAL!  It incorporates ferries and tunnels like you've seen in TtR Europe.

Hanging Gardens - 

Another Hans Im Gluck release that's interesting and fairly light super-filler with a spatial aspect.  Players start with a card of 6 empty plots.  Each round players must take (in turn order) another card to build onto their area.  The cards have 1-3 buildings in 4 different colors and buildings MUST be placed on either empty plots OR on top of other buildings.  In other words, you can't lay buildings onto the table (it's clearer if you see it).

THEN, you are working to group like-colored buildings together and set up scoring if you get groups of 3 or more.  The more you have, the more choice you get in the second part of the game (the part that actually earns you points).  IF you get 3 buildings together, you get to choose one of two tiles.  These tiles work in a similar way to the Goods cards you collect in groups in Oltremare.  If you get 1 tile of a particular type it's not worth much...2 of a type gets you more points...and so on.  These tiles are the only score in the game, so where they come out and how the cards come into play it certainly luck-dependent.

I thought all were interesting, but not AMAZING.  I'll be interested to see what Shel thinks.

That's all for today.  Podcast supplements will be up at some point tomorrow.

Doug