Oh, plenty of trains were being bought, I seriously don’t know how the game would have gone faster. All the other three player were more experienced than me, and I am not a slow player at all.
The blocking with stations and the always trying to find the most profitable route (and the good thing is that can be collective) plus the back and forwards with paper money are the main time consumers, and still there is always going to be the “I want to replace this tile” that can take some time, specially checking all the possible legal moves. So with that massive amount of upkeep, that’s why I think these games on a e-setting would benefit a lot, specially by the computer doing all the calculations for you, to start with.
But, as I said, all in all considered, I think slightly lighter games are going to be more attractive to me, or games with other theme and mechanics. It was great to feel what is like to play an 18XX game, but for how often I can sit at a table for a whole 9 hours, I’d rather play something else, and leave it for very special occasions.
Well, I hear of 4 hour games, so I know it can go faster.
But I have no experience with it, and I expect your experience is not uncommon. I’m just curious, because there is a second-hand 1830 available locally.
It annoys me when 18xx advocates recommend 1830 as an introductory vector into 18xx. It would be like someone introducing new players to negotiations games with Civilisation (not really a coincidence that the author is the same in these two games, as they represent an era of game design that doesn’t necessarily reflective current trends).
18Chesapeake is “1830, except designed in the 21st century” and it still has problems due to its adherence to the model that 1830 cast.
1830/18Chessie are bad ambassadors to the subgenre, but maintain popularity due, exclusively, to the champions of 18xx being nearly perfectly coincident with the group of people who have been playing 1830 for 35 years.
1889 is similar from what I can gather. If there was a satisfying 2-3 hour one I’d be interested to hear it. That said the high monetary cost usually puts me off.
On the 18XX fora on BGG, there are more than a few characters who state their opinion as fact.
I am a total newbie to the 18XX genre, and if there are other games that are more “agile”, I can see myself giving them a go…
As to buying them… unlikely. But the experience wasn’t off-putting other than by its length, to be fair.
I think our local experts tried to explain where to start here.
I am still waiting for my 18DO… looking forward to that one for sure. No never played any 18XX up to now. I’ll figure it out. 18DO is still going to be worth having to me.
More Cthulhu: Death May Die on Saturday, playing a new episode and a new Elder One (Hastur). Bit of a tricky play, we had to move moon symbols to a certain place, while moving through the phases of the moon, causing the tokens to flip, and then they can’t be moved. Got thru it, I died early ish. Hastur gives you tokens that mount up and force you to roll and take damage.
The Fuzzies , first play. A simple stacking game, with little balls of fluff that sort of stick together (unless you need them to, in which case they fall apart). Quick fun game (was a KS).
Sunday:
Another game of Cthulhu: Death May Die . Played with Hastur again, so knew how it would end up, with those damn yellow signs that he hands out as he moves along the track. These eventually cause you wounds. In comparison, Cthulhu sends you insane instead of wounding – but both kill you. It’s a cool system where you have half of the deck with cards from the Elder One, and the other half from the episode. So the core box gives you two Elder Ones, and six episodes. And of course different investigators change the gameplay up as well. Game went fairly well, but (again!) I died before getting to punch Hastur. To paraphrase Edison, I haven’t failed, I’ve just found ways of not succeeding. I had the marksmen skill, which allows you to shoot things from a room away. But I found myself stuck in a room with several enemies, and couldn’t move out without them all following me. And yet again, the last player pulled out the win! Very exciting! One day I hope to contribute to the win.
Fuzzies again
Nidavelllir – Once again, I lost by a single point. And its a game where the scores are 250+. If I had just upgraded one more coin!
Bandido , such a simple game, we must continue to play until we win.
Played a couple of new (to us) games yesterday. Everdell with the Pearlbrook expansion and Shasn.
Everdell continues to be a massive table hog (the expansion adds an extension to the board). The extra resources and objectives were okay, but I think I prefer Spirecrest.
Shasn is a territory control game with a political theme. It’s quite light and a bit “learn about politics through play”. We played with the “fall of Rome” deck, and it was quite enjoyable, but we thought the map was a bit large with 3 players and it would likely benefit from the max player count of 5.
1861/67 I really like. It’s got distribution in the US so is comparatively cheap there. Europe has a few. UK though, it depends what you can get it for on the secondary market it seems. It’s the cheapest option. It doesn’t strike me as the longest game as ‘The Russian’ forces the pace along potentially. It seems to have legs too as it’s stayed popular.
The auctions are fairly interesting without being almost entirely traps so shouldn’t hose 1 person first play. The mergers are fun and the dual track lay and loans mean plenty happens throughout the game. The production is luxurious. It comes at the expense of a huge box but after the chore of putting stickers on it should facilitate easy play with the trays and graphic design.
1889 is great, I will definitely back the GT kickstarter.
Of those the are currently available, I really like 18Mex. Arguably close to 1889 in being similar to 1830 but shorter if you’re up for a bit more of the ‘financial’ stream so if you want to try it sooner then that’s be my shout on that side although 18Chesapeake is a good game and the export will speed things along.
I find myself currently enjoying more the ops/route building side of things. Partly I feel the stick trashing has a negative petty air until you know what you’re doing and I don’t yet know what I’m doing there. So I’m rather excited to play 1861 irl especially as one friend said it was their favourite so there’s that recommendation.
Yesterday, my wife and I played another game of Lords of Vegas using the Up expansion. This game probably had the best distribution of cards that we have ever played. No casino felt horribly shorted, none of them had a bunch of their cards come out really early, really the only downside was two of the Strip cards came out before either of us had a casino on it.
The lots came out in interesting ways as well. I had nearly all of the A and B blocks, my wife had most of C, D was the really contested one which I eventually did get the majority, and E was an even split. My wife won the game, and it essentially happened in the middle after she managed a 6 tile casino in C, which (due to 2 player rules which does not use the F block, but still pays out when they are drawn) gave her 12 points (though probably only two or three movements on the score track) and something like 50 million in one turn. On her next turn she was able to Raise that casino, making it the equivalent of a 12 tile casino, and though I think it only paid out once more before the end of the game, it was enough. Score was 60 - 44.
Finally got Agricola to the table. 2 players. Obviously I lost. I don’t have strong feelings, which is odd; I was expecting to either love this game or hate it. I can’t remember what changes with the action board compared to when we played with 4, but forest and fishing were always available, at least on the turn after you needed them. I was able to fill my farm, whereas my wife used the occupation cards (like she does in Feast for Odin) to hoover up some points. I’m at a point atm where I’m wondering when I’m going to play this weight and length of game. I’m partially tempted to put it on sale for a silly price on geekmarket and let it go if someone wants it badly enough.
We just finished our first game of Rocketmen.
Including learning the game together (mostly, I had started yesterday) it took us something between 2 and 3 hours to finish the first game. I expect this time to go to around 2 hours with two people and some practice maybe as fast as 90 minutes. But I doubt that.
This is a deck building game about the space race. It feels quite unique in its composition of mechanisms. The biggest difference to every other deck builder I have ever played was that by the end of the game the draw deck had been bought up completely. ZERO cards left in the market and it doesn’t end the game (at least not without variants–I haven’t looked up what those do) and it includes a continuous deconstruction element as you play cards to your planned mission… more on that below.
The game ended very close with 31 to 29 points…
I forgot to take pics this time… my bad.
So here's the details. Beware: verbose.
In any case, each player’s starting deck has 12 mission cards. Each player has 6 mission tokens. There are different types of missions (spaceships, satellites, asteroid mining, space hotels …) and 3 different destinations to got to (Earth Orbit, Moon & Mars). Many missions allow to choose the destination.
There is a mostly random market of 6 cards. The draw deck for the market is constructed per player in the game and it’s very tight–as noted above we ran out of stuff to buy. There are two “eras” of tech one can buy and in between the tech cards are disaster cards like climate change that give VP to whoever “solves” each disaster (by buying it or using associated cards like Solar Panels solve Climate Change) but the disaster cards are just dead weight in the deck (see VP in Dominion).
Each card you play can provide either rocket engines, 1 of three asset symbols (or a joker) or money. Some provide both money and a symbol, a few cards provide nothing… many cards have special effects that either help with buying cards, discarding or drawing cards, during a mission. You can buy as many cards as you have money and assets (cards can cost assets, too). Engine cards are separate from the market, one can only buy 1 engine per round.
Buying cards is half the game. The other half is playing them on your launchpad. But first you have to play a mission. Playing a mission or cards to the launchpad
To launch a mission–you can try once each turn but you’ll probably want to build up over several turns–you need enough engines to get to your mission destination (it’s on the card something between 3 and 12 or so engine points). Each destination can be reached easier if you have certain assets. Computers make it easier to launch into earth orbit. Composite Materials make it easier to reach the moon and the third one (DNA?) is needed for Mars.
Each attempt starts the mission track at 0 with (~)6/8/12 steps needed to reach Earth Orbit/Moon/Mars. Initially, advance as many steps as there are the matching assets as part of the mission. Then draw from a special “Mission Sucess Deck” to advance further. Each destination has a max number of cards that can be drawn (3/4/5). If at any point before the last card you decide you aren’t going to reach the target (12 steps to Mars, 8 to the Moon and 6 to Earth) you can abort. Abortion costs though, you’ll need to discard cards from your mission as many as you drew from the Mission Success Deck minus 1. If you draw the last card and don’t reach the destination: mission failure, discard all cards from your mission and the mission. If you reach the destination, place a mission marker on that particular mission spot, gain VP and the mission specific “achievement” (permanent bonuses include money, engines, assets or +1 handsize). Successful missions get taken out of the game into your junkyard.
The game ends either when a certain number of VP are reached by a player or someone plays all their mission tokens–unless one destination has no mission then all players need to finish all their missions, preventing someone from an early end with just doing Earth missions over and over again)
What I liked about the game:
the on-going element of deck deconstruction which is one of my favorite mechanisms in deck builders. It’s really satisfying to play stuff to the mission to get it out of your deck. Only to land back with a huge oomph after a success or failure.
after an initial bit of irritation the small number of cards proved interesting, one cannot get to Mars without taking some risk there just aren’t enough cards…(we both completed one Mars mission successfully)
the race element shines when you play certain cards that take advantage of your opponent’s mission planning and then they just complete their mission and you are sitting on your Industrial Espionage with nothing to show for it.
While not as intricate as Leaving Earth in simulating the space race, it does evoke the theme.
The puzzle how to build up your deck and which cards to buy and which to get rid of and how to use them each turn continued to evolve throughout the game with turns getting more and more interesting including all the usual deck building tropes of discarding, drawing, junking cards… allowing for a (limited) number of combos.
As your deck grows and you have a few mission rewards to boost you every round, you can take on more difficult missions much quicker. The game really picked up the pace at some point as we had kind of learned how much luck we would need or had cards to mitigate bad luck…
It ended really close. I am not sure if there are truly multiple ways to win as the number of VP available in the game is very limited but the competition for them was open until the very last round.
However…
the start of the game dragged on and on, though this may be because it was a first game
play time was seriously too long, we’ll need to see if this changes with more plays
The cards are so different and unique that it was really hard to follow what my partner was doing. There are only a very small number of cards that are in the game twice for two players and those are in different “eras”
obviously as a card junky I want more different cards (not really a complaint this is also part of the appeal–see above)
the materials, sure I opted for the cheapest version but the board could have been a bit nicer. The box is full of air to accomodate the people who went with minis…it wasn’t really expensive so complaining about materials feels a bit wrong
I really really wish they had not put the game title on the card backs and the board and if they had to at least omit the designer’s name. Just saying. I know what I am playing at any given moment and if I don’t then it’s probably Cosmic Encounter and not Rocketmen.
So most of my complaints are possibly due to this being the first game. I’ll want to play again soon making this an 8/10 for now but eventually it’ll drop to a 7. I am glad I got to play this and we’ll see how exciting further games are.
My partner and I got some decent gaming in this weekend, starting out with a half-play of Far Away. We got about an hour in last night and again this morning, but it’s been slow going with the kid. We haven’t faced too much in the way of serious danger yet, but the potential is growing, and our little biome has started to get pretty wild. It hasn’t set either of our worlds on fire yet, but there is a pleasing tension to the gameplay, and I think it’ll be enhanced once we play without communication as intended (which we are decidedly not). As it stands, I’m handling the wildlife entirely, but we’re working out behaviours together. I don’t see this part ever changing, but we’ll see.
We paused with about half of our main mission complete, and two of three contingencies have been initiated. The mission structure is really quite enjoyable as well, and rolls out beautifully.
Meanwhile, we ended out the night with a couple of rounds of Men at Work, having secured a new copy this evening. I got the coveted “let’s play again” after I ended our first game in catastrophe. The second game was a whopper and we spent the back half of the game in sudden death, with 3 employee of the month tokens each. I managed to snag a 4th, but my partner took an overly bold move and collapsed the whole thing in grand fashion.
I played this at SHUX along with the other Pretzel games, and vowed to have 'em all (don’t mention Dead of Winter Flick 'em Up). This completes that promise, with arguably my favourite of the three.
I know. I can’t look at it without going “Why?”
It’s like running around with brand names stuck to your clothing (off topic: I wear so much outdoor gear and those companies as much as I love some of their products are guilty of this, too. I mean how do you recognize a German tourist in the wild? Right by the huge Jack Wolfskin logo on the pants, the Deuter/Vaude backpack and their Meindl shoes.)
