With and Against the Grain: EuroQuesting in the Year of the Golden Tiger

EuroQuest 2010 in Pikesville, MD, has come and gone, and it’s safe to say that no territory went unconquered, no dungeon went unplundered, and no prostitute went unshaven. It was the convention where we squared the circle and dared to spit in the face of (a) darkness and (b) the morning breakfast buffet. The Hilton was a great new location for the convention (tons of space), but God knows why the staff let me close enough to drop peyote into the oatmeal. No matter, though - didn’t change the taste one bit.

The highlights of the convention were a 5-hour, 5-player game of Conquest of the Empire with KingPut, IguanaDitty, and Co. (Friday) and a full day of reaping the AT harvest with Ska_Baron (Saturday).

Friday:

The CoE game was an event in which I nearly pulled out a win from a “dead last and shooting backward” position, although IguanaDitty ultimately pulled it out on the tiebreaker.

It was also cool to try newer releases like Circus Train, Gosu, and Magical Athlete – plus classics like Quebec 1759 - with the regular gang of hoodlums who don’t mind stirring up trouble and stretching the bounds of sanity.

Saturday:

Ska_Baron arrived early, I snagged a few friends and shiftless ne’er-do-wells, and we managed to slice through a ton of AT games and Euros before 5 pm: Castle Ravenloft, Ring-o Flamingo, Unspeakable Words x2, Age of Empires III, DungeonQuest x2, Cosmic Encounter, Parade, and Lost Cities.Unspeakable Words - a Cthulhu word game where players can lose outright by failing sanity checks - was at least a minor hit, and the others seemed to be well-received.

Also, there’s a funny story to go along with the DungeonQuest sessions. I tried to get a friend to join the game, but he introduced us to a friend-once-removed instead. The chap was a genuinely friendly and easygoing guy, although it was clear that DungeonQuest wasn’t up his alley. In fact, after he joined us for two consecutive games (he was a real sport), he remarked that he would probably rate the game a “1” on BGG. The next day, however, I briefly bumped into him again, and he mentioned that he was considering buying a copy of the game. He admitted that the game has a certain degree of psyche-damaging masochistic charm (his words), and he wants to see if he can eventually "beat that darn dragon".

Like I said, a good guy.

Games Played

My personal list of games played for the entire 4-day convention: Quebec 1759 x2, Lost Cities x2, Ghost Stories, Alien Frontiers, Can’t Stop x2, Magical Athlete, Conquest of the Empire, Gosu, Circus Train, Troyes, Onirim (2-player Z-man coop), Survive! (new version – awesome), For Sale x2, Kings & Things, Isla Dorada x2, London, Jager und Sammler, and the aforementioned games from the Saturday sessions (Age of Empires, Unspeakable Words, etc.).

Unusual was the fact that that I spent a majority of my time with timeless classics like Cosmic Encounter, Survive!, and Can’t Stop rather than newer offerings – but that was a nice change of pace. A great time, overall.

Unsolicited Comments, and Thanks Officer but I Prefer Not to Step Out of the Car

Below are comments on the games that were new to me, although let this serve as a warning that I have no problem being generally contrary and slightly ornery throughout.

Jager und Sammler:

One of the better "new to me" games played at the con, although that is the faintest praise possible given how ferociously awful most of the new games were.

The mechanical similarities spelled out in reviews of Jager und Sammler are true (similar to Hey! That's My Fish!, etc.), but Jager adds its own twists and turns in the form of set collection, the possibility of eliminating other players' explorers from the second half of the game, and minor movement variations.

I'm glad I played, and now I wish that I hadn't avoided Zombiegeddon (Sammler's evil twin) as strongly as I did.

Status: Would play again

Isla Dorada:

A reworking of Elfenland that is mechanics-light and production-heavy. It's Fantasy Flight, so no surprise there.

I can't stand Elfenland because players spend an inordinate amount of time planning their moves. All of that disappears in Isla Dorada because there's only a single moving expedition that travels by vote (terrain-based card auction). So it's move/score, move/score, etc. - a total of 16 times - until the game ends.

The scoring is based on location-specific treasures (positives) and curses (negatives), although the treasure cards aren't unique. So voting the expedition into a certain location can end up benefiting other players more than yourself, but sometimes that's just the way the camel rumbles.

Dorada has a ton of special cards, both benign and vicious. So it's a lucky, sloppy heaping of pot pie, to be sure, but when all is said and done the pie ain't half bad.

[Though be aware that I won a free copy of Isla Dorada at the convention, so my opinion may be unduly jaded.]

Status: Would play again

Kings & Things:

Speaking of zombie horror, it must be America's rekindled romance with zombie flicks that prompted Z-Man to resurrect this ancient corpse, as the reprint decision surely wasn't driven by the game's shining gameplay.

The game does have some things going for it, though. The use of hidden units in a multiplayer war game is unique, but the analogy that ultimately applies is that playing Kings & Things is like playing a block game where (a) all of the blocks are face down, so that players are incessantly flipping game pieces to check and recheck where everything is, and (b) reinforcements are drawn randomly each turn from a recruitment pool in which unit quality ranges from awesome to completely useless.

Without any exaggeration whatsover, I'd like to drive home the point that the need to constantly recheck the identity of units before, during, and after movement easily adds 30 minutes to the game's playtime. The genius who solves this logistical annoyance will have a load of cash coming his way.

Unit shuffling aside, there are plenty of gaming issues in K&T that get in the way of fun. Units must be spread evenly across the terrain types to protect the support of existing units, for example, since a player's unsupported units vanish when revealed. That makes it tough for a player make a decisive attack against an opponent without opening up his/her territory to invasion by other players.

Also, to hit the groove of my broken record one last time, a game this long (2-3 hours) shouldn't force critical elements such as player-hosing events, cash rewards, and hero recruitment to be resolved via die rolls and random chit pulls. To maintain any sense of fun whatsover, the more random the gameplay, the shorter the game should be.

Another issue: Players can get repeatedly knocked back to prevent them from winning, without any one player making any real progress towards ending the game. This points to the need for the game to have some sort of timing mechanism to JUST MAKE IT STOP.

To conclude, Kings & Things is another example of a game that fails to beat out Nexus Ops - which itself is merely good, rather than great - as the light- to middleweight multiplayer conflict game of choice. If a particular title is neither shorter nor more fun than Nexus Ops - and Kings and Things is neither - then why bother?

Or if it's randomness you want, get yourself a copy of the recent Cosmic Encounter re-release. It's tons more fun than K&T and a much shorter game, to boot.

Status: Would give the design team a stern talking to (and possible time-out), if they can be located

Circus Train:

If you care about winning (I stopped at some point), you can occasionally make short-term plans in Circus Train that come to fruition. However, the remaining 92% of gameplay involves desperately hoping that circus shows, entertainers, and victory points will randomly drop from the sky into a nearly space.

Note that I'm not entirely opposed to gratuitious chaos. I can appreciate DungeonQuest, for instance - which is completely and gleefully random - because the entire purpose of DQ is for players to groan and laugh as a sadistic underground reality beats on hopeless adventurers until they die. But the same degree of stupidity in a 90-120 minute game that pretends to be, well, a real game just sucks.

Oh, and Circus Train also includes random events and die-based recruitment attempts that dramatically affect players' opportunities for success. I'd hate to give you the impression that there is anything predictable or strategic about CT, after all, so I certainly want to come clean about that.

In sum, I felt like I was playing one of those lame corporate throwaways printed on the back of a cereal box, given both the quality of components (Winsome-style) and the sheer hopelessness of it all.

Caveat: I only played the basic game, but there's no way I'm giving this a second chance with either the advanced game or the expansion.

Status: KingPut and IguanaDitty like it, so what the hell do I know.

Troyes:

I find it amusing that there is a Troyes version of Monopoly, which I am 100% sure is the better game of the two.

The path to victory in Troyes: As early in the game as possible, identify one of the degenerate card combinations on the board and run in endless victory point circles until the game ends.

In my case, starting on round 2 or 3, I literally repeated the same two or three dice actions over and over again until I won, which was fun for absolutely no one at the table. Moreover, others did exactly the same thing; it just happened that my broken VP combo was a tiny bit better than theirs, as were the hidden endgame VP goals that I lucked into accomplishing.

I'd sooner cut out my tongue than ask to play this again.

Status: Tongue-free, like I said, is the way to go in this instance.

London:

This is my least favorite Martin Wallace game by a good stretch. Mr. Wallace has his ups and downs, like other designers, but this one drops to the bottom of the barrel for me.

London is essentially a pointless contribution to the Race from the Galaxy school of game design, in which players build their solitary, completely noninteractive tableau of cards and then squeeze money and victory points out of them.

What makes London significantly worse than those games (which I already dislike) is the following:

Players spend a lot of time (I mean, a LOT of time) staring into space waiting for their turn.

Players can randomly draw cards (Huguenots, Jewish Immigrants) that bestow double-draw benefits. There are also Pauper cards whose only purpose is to clog up players' hands with dead draws; these cards are, of course, also drawn at random.

Some cards are strictly worse than other cards, the only difference being that some cards are available for drafting later in the game due to the A/B/C deck structure.

In my first/last game of London, I found myself frequently hoping that I would draw a certain color card so that I could play its color-mate sitting in my hand. The game's potential reliance on a hope-based strategy is just rotten, and is certainly a hallmark of a bad game.

The board is barely necessary, as its only purpose is to keep track of action/VP areas purchased. The game could be revised to eliminate the board entirely, which if nothing else would drive down the price to a reasonable level.

The game is fatally flawed, in that the endgame trigger (when the last card is drawn) can completely screw players who need to play their last few cards and run their cities/tableaus one final time to be competitive.

(You don't get the final turn you need to win, and there's nothing that you could have done about it? Too bad. Go play a good game instead, and all will be better.)

Status: Would prefer to set on fire.

Conclusion:

I will end this literary travesty with a famous quotation, which you should do yourself a favor and heed for all time:

“Stop staring at my hot girlfriend and get one of your own.”

Long live the tiger.