Las Vegas Board Games Group Meetup – June 20, 2012

Havana

I started the evening off with Havana from 999 Games. The game’s owner, Dan, had won the game in a previous Las Vegas Board Games Meetup raffle and had yet to play it. Usually I hate figuring out a new game with other beginners, but Havana proved to be fairly easy to pick up. The artwork on the cards has great visual appeal, even if I don’t care for the imperialistic era the game tries to represent. I believe we were competing plantation owners trying to develop our properties, hiring Workers and finding Building Materials to do so, paying for our efforts occasionally with Pesos. These buildings are worth varying amounts of victory points and in a three player game, the first to 20 would be the winner.

I built a cheap building initially with a cost of two Pesos and then the game was on. Turn order depends on the two cards you are playing. Each card has a number from 0 to 9 with some numbers repeating. Cards are always read as the lowest two-digit combination so 9 and 2 become 29 with 0 and 8 becoming 08. The lowest two-digit number plays first, followed by the second lowest, and so on. However the higher-numbered cards tend to have potentially greater benefits. I was fond of Grandma who is a 9. She gave me access to half of the Rubble and half of the Building Materials. The problem is that a player playing a lower number may have reduced the available materials. Each turn you select a new card in secret to play which forces one of your old cards to retire. This also means you always know 50% of what your opponents will be doing next turn or even more if you pay attention to which cards they have already retired. One of the cards does allow you to bring cards back into your hand as well. There are also offensive actions in the form of Tax Collectors and Materials Thieves. These can deprive your opponents of their resources, but each resource-stealer has a counter card that can be played to block it. These blocking cards are also number 2’s, helping to enable a better place in the turn order.

Our game turned out to be a very close one, heating up at the end when I seized victory by trying to have a low combined number and was able to get the building I needed to ensure my victory. Other than the secret choice of which card you will be bringing out each turn, Havana has no secrets. There are no game-changing cards revealed at the end of the game and you can easily tabulate your opponents’ victory point totals while you’re playing. The final building I built was worth 4 victory points bringing me from 16 to 20. One opponent was already at 19 and the second had been tied at 16 with me. 999 Games has a fast-paced, enjoyable game in Havana and I would love to play it again and possibly use some of the four or five cards I never even played. Having even more players would also add to the strategic aspect of the game without overburdening it, I think.

The Golden City

Up next was The Golden City from Kosmos, yet another game involving colonizing and trade routes. For a four player game we had 16 outpost or settlement markers and the game would end as soon as someone built all 16. Actually getting to the valuable center of the mysterious Golden City is the most rewarding with a large number of Letters of Business awarded. This also requires a special key, obtained by building an outpost on a key-rewarding point on the map of the island. Game play is based on little geographic cards that are either Ports or one of four region types, Desert, Forests, Mountains, or Plains. Each round players select a pair of cards dealt face up to bid on. You can pay an additional coin to displace someone else’s bid to get the preferred cards you want. If you want to retake the same pair of cards you were just kicked off, it would cost a further additional coin. The most common settlement areas on the map reward players with either more coins or more territory cards to use.

Perhaps two thirds of the way through the game I realized how perilous my position on the map was. I was expanding out instead of in to the Golden City and my efforts to block others’ routes really hadn’t paid off. Luckily I was able to secure a valuable post in the Golden City several turns after the others had all done so already. I was the only player to build on a settlement square that grants access to a special deck of cards. The card I chose rewarded me at the end of the game for each of my card-producing outposts, garnering me 8 points, if I recall correctly. Placing my 16th settlement ended the game and I was a bit surprised by how close it was. The winner had 56, second had 52, I had 50, and last place had 35.

One aspect of The Golden City that I never pursued was that each turn there is a bonus map area that is rewarded for development. The other players either developed according to the bonus area or seemed to always be in the right place at the right time. While I did manage a few Letters of Business for happening to have an outpost in the designated area one or two turns, I mostly ignored it. On the other hand, the game also has a random preferred commodity each turn such as Liquor or Fruit, rewarding 2 trading vouchers for having it, with 2 more for having the most of the commodity. These I did attempt to collect, but possibly to my detriment because I was not expanding into the heart of the Golden City, denying myself the points from those territories as well as not blocking my opponents’ access.

Revolution

I found myself playing Revolution from Steve Jackson Games with the Meetup’s founder Stephan Brissaud aka Frenchy and two fierce opponents from previous Vegas Board Game Meetups. Initially I thought I understood what I was dealing with in Revolution. Each turn you bid in secret on securing the support of allies in the Revolution with a choice of 12 on a little bidding board. The boards are revealed and the winner for each partisan is determined by the highest bid of either Force, Blackmail, or Gold, with some personalities uninfluenced by a particular currency of Revolution. The Captain (of the Garrison), for example, cannot be won over with Force. Instead he must be Blackmailed or bought with Gold. Simple enough, right?

Midway through the game I realized that both I and Frenchy were vastly outclassed and we both knew it. In Revolution it is entirely possible to have wasted your bribes or payments each turn if a superior bid has been entered against you. I know both Frenchy and I had at least one round each where our efforts were entirely wasted. In focusing on a pattern of picking the Rogue who generates Blackmail in order to Blackmail the Captain who generates Force to then Force the Rogue to my side, I had not amassed much Support, which is the measurement of victory in the game. I tried to switch tactics to capture more Support with not much success as the final scores show. I had 47 Support and Frenchy had 58. In second place David had 185 Support and Zach, the former Munchkin World Champion, had 214.

Despite the overwhelming defeat, I would like to play Revolution again. What really killed me was not paying attention to my eroding playing pieces on the board. When the game ends, after a certain amount of rounds, extra Support is awarded to whomever has the majority of pieces in each of the board’s locations such as the Tavern or Garrison. On the other hand, Revolution is not forgiving and has no recovery mechanic. I don’t see where I could have recovered after the first few rounds and botching something on a turn and getting nothing can be very devastating. Force, Blackmail, and Gold go away each round. If you happened to be outbid on everything, you still gain 5 Gold at the end of the turn for your next bid, but compared to a Force or Blackmail, Gold is useless. The lesson is that Revolution indeed does have a very slippery slope.

Would I play it again? Definitely. The next go round though I would pay a lot more attention to trying to win from the start of the game and try to read my opponents’ bidding style to get an indication of what sort of bid they might make each turn. An integral part of the game is also announcing at the end of the turn, before the next round of bidding, what sort of currency/bribes you have for that turn. I paid only slight attention to my opponents’ capabilities during this game, but I will be sure to take my opponents’ coercion methods further into account in the future.

King of Tokyo

As the head of Iello USA, Frenchy is the distributor for Richard Garfield’s King of Tokyo. Garfield may be familiar as the creator of Magic: The Gathering. King of Tokyo seems simplistic by comparison, perhaps deceptively so. You have your kaiju or monster stand-up playing piece and you roll dice, trying to either be the last surviving monster or to try to achieve 20 Victory Points, with the winner being the King of Tokyo. The monster cards have dials to keep track of those victory points. Each of the King of Tokyo dice has an Attack emblem, a Lightning symbol, a Life, and the numbers 1-3 on its faces. Players can keep dice results they like after rolling the 6 dice and get up to two re-rolls. One way to get Victory Points is to enter Tokyo, but another is by having multiples of at least three of the same value on the dice, with a 3-3-3 worth 3 points and a 3-3-3-3 worth 4 points, I believe.

One of the things I liked about King of Tokyo was the slight amount of variety in the actions you could pursue. I didn’t focus on making sets of numbers to gain victory points for example. Instead I kept Life results to go up in hit points, kept Attacks to damage my opponents, and most importantly tried to get Lightning/Energy for the coolest part of King of Tokyo: the special attacks deck. There are three random cards drawn from the deck that represent special Kaiju attacks that players can buy, with a new one being dealt to replace any card purchased. The card art is excellent and it is remarkable that players can play an entire game without ever purchasing a card to use and therefore might never see more of the beautiful card art.

In the end my pseudo-strategy didn’t pay off. I was eliminated after a few other monsters. This is a refreshing aspect of King of Tokyo; in every other modern board game I have played in the last few months there are no eliminations. Every player is involved until the end of these other games, however painfully as Revolution showed earlier. Just like Magic: TG or Monopoly, in KoT once you are killed you are out of the game entirely. As anti-social as this might be, the game also has a powerful socializing influence. When a player’s monster enters Tokyo the game changes to an us vs. them game with those on the physical board doing damage to every monster on the outside with their attacks and vice versa. While there isn’t any collaboration possible with this mechanic, I did find myself cheering my allies’ attacks on the monsters inside Tokyo when they were able to hit. The two players on Tokyo and Tokyo Bay must likewise feel ganged up on and a sense of comraderie. In smaller games though, the second location of Tokyo Bay is not used.

More than the other games of the evening, King of Tokyo has a real beer-and-pretzels game feel to it. I couldn’t see playing it for hours on end, but it functioned well to cap off an enjoyable evening and would be great in between other board games or during an RPG break for some quick carnage.