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rbandrewsTonight, I played Louis XIV.
Okay, here's how the game works: There are twelve little cardstock boards, laid out in a checkerboard square pattern so that four are on the interior and eight are on the outer edge. You place tokens on them to gain control of them, and having control of them at the end of the round gives you cool abilities. The interior ones give you tokens that you use to buy things, and the exterior ones have neat special abilities.
Influence tokens become mission tokens which become neat abilities that your player has for the rest of the game.
Here's what I think of it: I like it a lot. In most games, you make one decision a turn, maybe two. In games like Puerto Rico or Princes of Florence, you're making four or five decisions a turn. In Louis XIV, everything you do is a decision, practically. Just to place tokens on the board, you have to decide which card to play, whether to play it to get tokens or place tokens, how many tokens to place, how many to move and where to move them to, etc. Scoring the boards after the round is over requires you to decide whether to pay money to get a board if it's that kind of board, how to do the special ability if it's on the outer edge. Fulfilling mission cards involves which tokens to use to get it (you almost always have a choice), what kind to replace it with, etc. You have a great deal of control over exactly how you use your resources each turn, and the "correct" choice is very rarely clear.
Bad things: The theme is pasted on. You can sorta tell that the theme of French aristocracy makes sense, like the mission card that lets you control the Dauphin, or the courtesan that practically everything gives you free influence with ("Man, she'll sleep with anyone, won't she?" --Emily), and things like that, but the game is really very abstract. You never really feel like you're influencing courtiers the way that you feel like you're managing production of crops in Puerto Rico. Some flavor text on the cards might help, but really, the abstractness doesn't bother me. It never actually contradicts its theme (Alexandros), but elements, like what the mission cards actually are thematically, make no sense whatsoever.
Anyway, I like it a lot. This probably made no sense to anyone who hasn't played it, but it's that sort of game. Its rules make no sense until you play it, but then it clicks pretty quickly.
The other game I played this evening is Babel. I know that there's a lot of strategy involved in the bidding, but I just completely don't understand how to do it right. I'm really not sure why I won. I'll have to try it again to see if it makes more sense the second time. It's not really my sort of game, in that it's a bidding game, but it is a weird quasi-diplomatic game where you can't actually backstab people and you're all working together, so in that sense it's exactly my sort of game. And I won, so I'm supposed to like it, right?
Okay, here's how the game works: There are twelve little cardstock boards, laid out in a checkerboard square pattern so that four are on the interior and eight are on the outer edge. You place tokens on them to gain control of them, and having control of them at the end of the round gives you cool abilities. The interior ones give you tokens that you use to buy things, and the exterior ones have neat special abilities.
Influence tokens become mission tokens which become neat abilities that your player has for the rest of the game.
Here's what I think of it: I like it a lot. In most games, you make one decision a turn, maybe two. In games like Puerto Rico or Princes of Florence, you're making four or five decisions a turn. In Louis XIV, everything you do is a decision, practically. Just to place tokens on the board, you have to decide which card to play, whether to play it to get tokens or place tokens, how many tokens to place, how many to move and where to move them to, etc. Scoring the boards after the round is over requires you to decide whether to pay money to get a board if it's that kind of board, how to do the special ability if it's on the outer edge. Fulfilling mission cards involves which tokens to use to get it (you almost always have a choice), what kind to replace it with, etc. You have a great deal of control over exactly how you use your resources each turn, and the "correct" choice is very rarely clear.
Bad things: The theme is pasted on. You can sorta tell that the theme of French aristocracy makes sense, like the mission card that lets you control the Dauphin, or the courtesan that practically everything gives you free influence with ("Man, she'll sleep with anyone, won't she?" --Emily), and things like that, but the game is really very abstract. You never really feel like you're influencing courtiers the way that you feel like you're managing production of crops in Puerto Rico. Some flavor text on the cards might help, but really, the abstractness doesn't bother me. It never actually contradicts its theme (Alexandros), but elements, like what the mission cards actually are thematically, make no sense whatsoever.
Anyway, I like it a lot. This probably made no sense to anyone who hasn't played it, but it's that sort of game. Its rules make no sense until you play it, but then it clicks pretty quickly.
The other game I played this evening is Babel. I know that there's a lot of strategy involved in the bidding, but I just completely don't understand how to do it right. I'm really not sure why I won. I'll have to try it again to see if it makes more sense the second time. It's not really my sort of game, in that it's a bidding game, but it is a weird quasi-diplomatic game where you can't actually backstab people and you're all working together, so in that sense it's exactly my sort of game. And I won, so I'm supposed to like it, right?
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Date: 2005-07-07 08:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-07 02:03 pm (UTC)We considered waiting around for you, but nobody knew your phone number to call you, and we didn't know when or if you'd be coming, so we didn't.
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Date: 2005-07-07 06:12 pm (UTC)I also don't know why I didn't call you then, I have your number in my cell phone.
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Date: 2005-07-07 08:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-07 03:29 pm (UTC)