Patri's Journal: Current

This is Patri's current journal. It is kept on LiveJournal as patrissimo, but you are reading the archived copy on patrifriedman.com.

Games! (comment on this entry at LiveJournal)

Entry Date: 2004-07-12 01:29:00 Logged: 2004-07-12 01:31:58
Current Mood: satisfied Current Music: Paul Sauvanet-Nomad-Oasis
We had a great weekend of playing with the new games. I seem to be the heavyweight lately, especially with not around to dominate the Puerto Rico/San Juan[1]. I won Barbu for the 6th time in the last 8 games, I've definitely got the hang of it. But there is more to learn - Andy, Rob and I practiced bid together on a set of 7 hands. While I think Andy misestimated a No Last Two hand (Rob and I didn't like it at all), on several other contracts he seemed to be analyzing them better than I was, so we all have more to learn. I predict duplicate Barbu will help that enormously, but we need 8 players and we only have 5 or 6. I suspect I'm better at playing than at declaring/bidding (ie I think I make losing doubles more often than Andy[2] does). Though we'll learn that from the statistics we keep talking about computing (we save all our scores as spreadsheets, so we have the data ready).

Then Rob & I tied for a win at Ticket To Ride, which was a great game. Just as advertised, it had simple rules and complex gameplay, which is great. The Spiel Des Jahr did not let us down. I did well at picking up the essential principles immediately, I think it helped a little that I've played several other rail games (ie Empire Builder), so am used to thinking about minimal edge sets to span a vertex set...er, I mean, minimal track laying to reach all your destinations :).

Then the bloodthirsty Friedmans and a couple others played Warhammer Quest and I played San Juan with neophytes , , and Daniel[3]. made a good run but I ended up winning.

Then we tried Power Grid, which was a lot more complicated than Ticket To Ride, although not super-complicated on the general scale of games. I seriously mis-analyzed it and made a couple big strategic errors, others seemed to play better, and Daniel eked out by a small margin. It had a lot of negative feedback which is a little frustrating, it looks to me like a large part of playing well is "gaming" the games negative feedback mechanism by keeping low on the resource it uses to track your progress while developing everything else first. I didn't realize this and was out in front, and when the feedback got stronger in the mid/late game I was screwed. At the end, the game seems to turn into one of these "If I don't block A then he will win, but if I block A then B will win" kind of things where the result depends on who chooses to block who and how well they do it. (Like Illuminati). Which I don't like, its fun to have some interdependency between the players, but I don't like it quite this strong, and it seems to add a lot of randomness to the endgame. I like randomness, but I prefer it to be a constant factor to be dealt with throughout the game. Still, there is plenty to the game, and I'll definitely be playing it again.

Finally, Rob, and I played Ticket to Ride again. Rob had a lot of low scoring tickets and short segments, and tried to grab a couple too-long routes and we blocked him, so even though I got blocked once for a 22 point swing I was able to win by a fair bit. Both games I seemed to get tickets that worked fairly well together, though in the first game I made a big mistake keeping a ticket where I didn't get anywhere near either of the two cities.

[1] And to pleasantly distract me? Nah, its pleasant but I don't think I actually get distracted, I'm very singleminded about games.[a]

[2] Yes, Andy is the standard of comparison. If I'm the monster, he's the demi-monster.

[3] I failed at remembering/figuring out his LJ username.

[a] Note to self: having admitted this, must only use "My girlfriend distracted me" as an excuse for losing to people who don't read this journal.
So I won 4 out of 5 - woohoo! I'm very glad that started game day, I get a lot of enjoyment from playing and from how much fun everyone else has too. I've definitely got the Fun, Friends, Romance, Hobbies parts of my life covered, if only I could do better on Work I'd truly have it all...been thinking about applying at Google lately, we'll see.
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