At the Gates of Loyang
The last of the solo games that I managed to play during my holiday. (I was really wanting to give Nusfjord a try alongside this, but it didn’t work out. Hopefully I’ll give that a whirl over the next few days.)
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It took me 2-3 hours to re-learn and get through my first game, and for most of it I was thinking that my (single) previous game’s score of 16 was near-miraculous, so slow was my progress; but things can move quickly at the end, and I finished the game with a relatively-respectable 15. Still 2 short of a “good” score, but much better than I’d anticipated.
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Game 2 was much faster, now that I knew what I was doing, and I was making satisfying progress right from the start, and consequently I scored… 15. The same outcome as game 1. Darn it. (Closer to the 16 threshold than before, but still…)
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I finally reached the dizzy heights of 16 – and was only 5 coins short of the glorious “good” threshold of 17. However I put one of those points down to a particular realisation I’d had after game 2, which I think would have boosted me a point in each of those games as well; and so I’m not sure the bulk of the game was a significant improvement.
I’m really not sure about this game.
I’ve quite enjoyed other Rosenbergs, but I never play them enough to acquire any real skill at them, so each time has always just been me bumbling around and hoping for the best – having a pretty good time, but also generally a bit lost, and not feeling like I’m actually competing with the other players.
I bought ATGOL (and Nusfjord) specifically because they are considered to be two of his best solo game designs (and I also felt that I could get on board with these themes more than some of his others; especially ATGOL). As such, I’ve really been looking forward to acquiring some actual multi-game experience for once, and seeing how things progress as I gain more familiarity with the systems.
Unfortunately my experience of playing it three times in quick succession has been that, despite a semi-random set-up, and despite the specifics of each game varying, I feel like I’m doing all the same things for almost exactly the same end result; and moreover, that the potential for improvement is that, with time and practice, I might be able to do all the same things and, at the end of an hour, have “17” instead of “16”.
It’s just not an exciting prospect.
(I also have a hunch that making the jump up to a score of 18 or 19 is going to involve a degree of maths that I’m just not looking for in a solo board game.)
It would probably help slightly if I included the ‘tie-breaker’ remaining money as a part of the score, because when playing solo, you’re essentially breaking ties with your prior games all the time. That way you’d at least have a more granular score with more variation game-to-game.
Mostly I think it just hasn’t fared well as a solo experience against the other games I’ve played in the past few days. In the absence of human opponents and social interactions, I think randomness (and consequent variations in gameplay and outcomes) might be rather valuable attributes for a solo game. If I play a game three times in succession, I really don’t want to feel like I had the exact same experience three times in succession. ATGOL does have randomness, but it all seemed to be inconsequential in terms of the experience.
I’m not giving up on it yet, but I can see myself selling this one on.