What I Played Today: February 2

Finca, Maori, The Good, the Bad and the Munchkin, Thunderstone

Of course, I would start this great experiment on Board Game Night, probably the nerdiest night of my week (as opposed to all my other nights, banging chicks and downing brewskies). On Tuesdays, when I’m feeling it, I sneak out of work early and drive down the local gaming store, Black Diamond Games, and play board games with a usual crowd. Usually pretty fun, and fairly good socializing, even if there are elements that make gaming a little difficult.

Anyway, I walk in tonight to find that an 8-player game of RoboRally had been started...which pretty much locked down the majority of the players for the whole evening. RoboRally can be entertaining, but man does it take forever. So I instead sat in for a series of short games with another couple of latecomers.

We played a game each of the two latest from Hans im Gluck, a Germany publisher who’s known for small, crunchy games and is typically distributed in America by Rio Grande. These two came practically packaged together, so half the people in the store own it.

The first, Finca, is a resource management game that involves a really simple resource collection system and basically a test of hoping you get what you need before someone else does something to screw it up. When I read the rules, I was intrigued by the anti-monopoly rules that forced your resources back to the pot if too much was taken, but disappointed that resources were so plentiful that it never came up. In all, a fairly easy game that I’m not terribly interested in playing again.

The second, Maori, is a tile-laying game that involves trying to create a small archipelago that provides the most points, through managing how many trees or huts you have in your region. The tiles are taken from a 4 by 4 grid that a small boat circles, and you can take tiles based on where the boat ends up. The rules are simple, just make sure the islands line up, with a few variations to increase the difficulty, and it played really quick and easy to pick up. A little fun, although there’s a lot of luck involved and it was frustrating to watch one guy’s plan completely fall apart because the pieces he needed just did not come up. I imagine it would flounder after two or three more games.

After these games, the steam of the group had fallen apart. I was waiting for a friend to show up, and he was due in fifteen minutes, and wasn’t ready to jump into a longer game. The others were a bit fatigued, and so we eventually settled for a game of Munchkin, a game that I actually dislike a lot. It was slow going (one player didn’t know how to play and wasn’t being taught), and we weren’t really into it. I practically begged the game to end after half-an-hour, when it was clear that nobody was having that much fun.

The group I was with called it a night, and my friend arrived, and he wanted to get in a game of Thunderstone, the recent Dominion clone that changed the setting to the fantasy realm and tried to change things just enough to make it clear it wasn’t Dominion. The RoboRally game had broken up and we pulled another willing to learn, and played a fast-moving game. I’m still on the fence about this one, just because it seems too concerned with changing things and not enough with making sure things work. It’s hard to get a hand to work for you, because there are so many different cards you need to acquire to get some victory points, and there’s a lot to track. But I do know it enough now for it to run smoothly, and it certainly has more flavor and aesthetics than its inspiration...my friends like it, though, so it’ll probably see a bit more play. Should have more coherent thoughts about it after another play.

In all, a bit disappointing in terms of selection but still fun in terms of socializing. Being able to play games without having to buy them upfront and be disappointed later was good; I now know I don’t need to get either Finca or Maori, so that’s a load off my mind.