The Mine Shaft Gap

Venue: Paul’s place
Present: Alex, Jeff, Neil F., Pat, Paula, Paul.
Played: Race for the Galaxy, Battlestar Galactica, Silk Road, Auf der Pirsch.

A much reduced complement tonight as everyone else moves into or emerges from the holiday season.

Race for the Galaxy: The starter in space.
33 mins game time.
Results: Pat (blue): 48. Alex (red): 43. Jeff (green): 38.

Battlestar Galactica: Fresh from Thursday night for Pat and me, we launched this onto Neil, Alex and Jeff for their first playing. There was much paranoia early in the first ‘phase’, although by the end of this part I think all of us had concluded that probably no-one had drawn a Cylon card.
Pat took the Admiral Adama character and was able to consistently draw jump values of 3 each with each jump. Alex was Starbuck, and proved to be quite successful at holding back the Cylon Raider hordes. I was the President this time, and I was able to be effective with green card contributions to skill checks and the use of quorum cards to stave off the boarders (a rule that we played wrong last time). Although we lost a few civilian ships, we spent more effort in this game protecting our population. As a result, the humans were looking very healthy at the ‘half-way’ point, so healthy in fact that any Cylons were not going to get it easy once drawn. Their best chance would be to try to run down the fuel, which was sitting at 2 points remaining.
Well, I drew a Cylon card at the 2nd draw point, and I suspected that either Jeff (as Boomer) or Neil (Chief Galen Tyrol) had the other; most likely Jeff just through the weight of statistics (he had three cards to everyone elses two).
In hindsight I should have activated my Cylon-ness immediately on my next turn in order to be as successful as possible. I ended up doing this instead on the second or third turn around, after not taking account of the fact that when you reveal, you effectively lose a whole turn of actions to be transported to the Cylon Resurrection ship. But I thought it would be worthwhile to the Cylon cause to play out at least one Crisis card that put some combat pressure onto the team. The two Crisis cards I drew as President were rather soft and the (harder) one I did choose ineffectually wound down Morale by another point or so.
I read somewhere (game tips in the rulebook, maybe), that as a loyal human in the first half of the game, you want to play well for the Galactica, but not too well, lest you become a Cylon in the second half. While I tried to observe this, I probably did contribute far too many positive cards to the Skill checks. But the real killer, and most significant difference between this game and Thursday’s, was the rate that the jump card values were revealed - as stated, Pat (as the loyal Admiral) pulled out three 3s in a row, which basically put too much ‘distance’ between Galactica and the Cylons for the latter to have a late chance.
38 mins rules and setup; 115 mins game time.
Results: Loyal humans Pat, Alex and Neil F. successfully reach Earth before the Cylon infiltrators Paul and Jeff could pull them back.

Silk Road: Something light for 5p was chosen, with Neil heading off (we didn’t get to play his Cavum) and Paula joining in.
Another game of paranoia, with people suspecting me of being in the lead following a few cash pickups I was able to make.
We played the straight rules, but I’m now convinced that the next play of this needs to use Marshall P’s variant (described here under Greg Schloesser’s review) of paying to take an action token, rather than the arbitrary assigning of turn order.
18 mins rules and setup; 47 mins game time.
Results: Alex and Jeff: 39 each. Pat: 38. Paula and Paul: 30 each.

Auf der Pirsch: Another game to get a second work-out in this group since Thursday, with Pat and Paula the veterans.
6 mins rules; about 30 mins game time.
Results (player: 4 individual hand scores,total): Alex: 39,33,36,32,140. Pat: 30,8,24,56,118. Jeff: 18,30,33,20,101. Paula: 14,44,10,13,81.

Venue: Pat’s place
Present: Euhan, Brad, Mark, Lindsay, Alex, Jeff, Richard V., Rick D., Pat, Paula, Paul.
Played: Battlestar Galactica, Dominion, Chicago Express, Leader 1, Bluff, Chicago Express (again), Ticket to Ride Card Game, Metropolys, Carcassonne, Le Havre, Traders of Carthage, Airships, Auf der Pirsch.

What better time during the holiday season to get into some serious gaming - New Years Day.
I haven’t reported on “Miscellaneous Holiday Gaming” as I often do at this time, but for the record I got Stone Age as a Christmas present and Qwirkle; the former providing a couple of two-player sessions, as did San Juan. The latter saw some family gaming sessions, along with Margaret & David At The Movies Boardgame.
Pics for this session are mostly disappointing; I just wasn’t careful enough while taking them. But there is one exception - one of the Chicago Express close-ups came out quite nicely.

Battlestar Galactica is one of the new titles obtained recently by Pat and I made sure I put my hand up for this early in the afternoon. A weird choice maybe - I’m not a fan of the show (only because I don’t normally get a chance to watch it), and I’m not usually all that wrapped in co-operative games. But I have seen a few of the TV show eps, almost by accident, and was riveted. Besides that, the box and game art looked nice and I’m always keen for a new game.
With the nature of play being about co-operation amongst the Galactica crew members against one or more unknown Cylon traitorous infiltrators, there are some obvious similarities to games like Shadows over Camelot. Like the latter, there are multiple ways for the Cylons to defeat the ‘good guys’, who have to race through challenges to reach their objective. Individual players represent individual characters in a story and each character has their own set of unique attributes and capabilities. But in this game we only had four players, while I don’t think I’ve ever played SoC with less than 6. Shadows also has a somewhat different feel about player interaction, with just about everyone having an opinion of how everyone else should play. There is an element of this too in BG, although less so.
In this game I was Admiral Adama while Pat was the President and I forget who Brad and Lindsay were - the ‘pilot’ (Starbuck?) and the ‘engineer’ respectively, I think. Not long into the game, and Pat must have suspected me as the secret cylon and sent me to the brig. About a turn or so later, Lindsay sent Pat to the brig and effectively gave himself away as the real traitor. A short while later we managed to send Lindsay there too, but he simply revealed his true identity and sent himself to the resurrection ship where he could begin doing some real damage. But this was after he managed to force an FTL jump, which ended up burning off three population.
As our key attributes (food, fuel, morale and population) ticked towards zero, our path to Earth crept forward at a painfully slow pace. Lots of 1s, the occasional 2 with damaging side-effects, and I never even saw a 3. In the end it was our population that lost it for us - too many lost civilian ships in Raider attacks and crisis cards. With 20-20 hindsight (6-6 in metric) we should have looked after them a lot better than we did. Congratulations to the traitorous Lindsay.
35 mins rules and setup; 160 mins game time.
Some extra trivia: While Lindsay asserted that the series had finished and the last episode shot and shown on television, Brad was incredulous and believed it was still in production. A follow-up message from Lindsay on Saturday indicates that indeed the show is not over, and that new episodes will be shown on US TV this January…

Dominion: This big card game didn’t look particularly compelling to me, but I was reassured by Pat that this very much my kind of game. We’ll see, perhaps in a later session. In this case, Jeff, Mark and Alex actually pushed in two games of this - 10 mins rules and setup; 35 mins game time for the first, 20 mins game time for the second.
Results (player: Game 1 score; Game 2 score): Jeff: 45, 32. Alex: 34, 26. Mark: 33, 24.

Chicago Express: Yet another train game. In this one, bid on railway shares and build lines from the east coast of the US through to Chicago.
22 mins rules and setup; 63 mins game time.
Results: Paula: 111. Euhan: 74. Richard: 64.

Leader 1: Yet another race game. In this one, cyclists break away from the peleton when they get to their favourite part of the course, based on whether they are a sprinter, climber, or downhill specialist.
About 1 hour.
Results: Richard first, by a nose. Paula 2nd, then Alex, Mark, Euhan, and Jeff.

Bluff: Dice. Filler.
First eliminated: Jeff. Then Paula, Alex, Richard. Euhan wins.

Chicago Express (again): In this play I managed to get a seat at the table. Paradoxically, early bids seemed tentative, but I thought they were on the high side. In retrospect, upon completion, I see that we could have all afforded to bid a bit more. The trouble is, in particular with a first playing, that assessing the relative value of each of the train lines is pure guesswork - a true gamble.
I didn’t know what I was doing for most of this game and this is reflected in the scores. It’s possible that Rick was at an even greater disadvantage in having a somewhat truncated rules explanation. Lindsay played like a pro, cornering the market on red line shares early - he got two and I got the 3rd.
BTW, here’s the one picture of the evening that I’m happy with.
18 mins rules and setup; 77 mins game time, not counting a pizza pause in between.
Results: Lindsay: 101. Jeff: 100. Pat: 76. Paul: 65. Rick D: 40.

Ticket to Ride Card Game:
About 30 mins total (pizza break in the middle).
Results: Alex: 84. Paula: 72. Brad: 65. Richard V: 17.
Obviously not Richard’s night for trains.

Metropolys: The train line builders switched to sky-scraper builders.
About 1 hour.
Results (player: Territory, special, other score, total): Brad: 12, 10, 14, 36. Alex: 8,8,11,27. Paula: 8,0,18,26. Richard: 8,4,10,22.

Carcassonne: 2p filling.
Results (after some cancellings): Paula (green): 63. Alex (yellow): 46.

Le Havre: This follows in the wake of Agricola, but (strangely, perhaps) reminds me more of Roads & Boats. This is because of the development ‘pathways’ available to scale up the value of the commodities you pull from the docks. The points values of the buildings seem to be key, and for this reason I also see a hint of Phoenicia thrown into this mix!
A very nice blend, although I think the artwork could have been better - maybe it’s just the stark orange-yellow roofs on the dock supply buildings that are a bit off.
Anyway, even though my first go at this sucks, I could see this becoming my new favourite game for a while…!
21 mins rules and setup; 150 mins game time.
Results: Jeff (red): 122. Alex (blue): 115. Paula (green): 101. Paul (purple): 80.

Traders of Carthage: Another new card game in Pat’s collection.
About 10 mins rules and 42 mins game time.
Results: Pat, Rick D: 17 each. Lindsay: 9.

Airships: Called Giganten der Lüfte in earlier posts here.
Dicing up that reminds me of something, but I’m not sure what (although it’s not Yahtzee!).
10 mins rules and setup; 35 mins game time.
Results: Alex: 9. Jeff: 8. Paul: 6.

Auf der Pirsch (also called Trump, Tricks, Game!): As the English translation says, this is basically a trick-taking game but apparently with some ’strangeness’ in how earlier plays set up for the pattern of tricks in the last hand. The flavouring is about tracking animal footprints.
10 mins rules and setup; 25 mins game time.
Results: Lindsay: 160. Pat: 152. Paula: 72. Rick D: 58.

Venue: Pat’s place
Present: Euhan, Brad, Nick, Lindsay, Alex, Jeff, Rick D., Brian, Pat, Paul.
Played: Mr. Jack, Stone Age, Agricola, Oregon, Amun Re, SushiZock im Gockelwok, RoboRally, Galaxy Trucker, Nexus Ops, Puerto Rico, Bluff, Tichu.

It seems to have been a long time between tokens for Euhan, Nick and even Neil M. - good to see them all back and into it.
And the Xmas season begins to emerge. You really know it’s nearly Xmas when… you arrive at Pat’s house and his neighbour’s house looks a little like this. Sorry for the blurriness here; I didn’t exactly come prepared with tripod.
Actually, apart from this one, the rather blurry Nexus Ops pic, and the washed-out Galaxy Trucker one, I’m quite happy with the way many of tonight’s shots turned out. The best ones are probably the Stone Age and the RoboRally close-ups…

Mr. Jack: Character movements and deduction to identify and capture Jack the Ripper, with Euhan and Neil M.
Neil captured Euhan’s Mr Jack on turn 7.

Stone Age: In progress when I turned up. Apart from the brief moment to take a snap, I didn’t see any of this game. But a glance at the scores implies a customary overwhelming performance by Lindsay.
Results: Lindsay (green): 214. Nick (red): 154. Rick D. (yellow): 139. Brad (blue): 97.

Agricola: Also in progress when I arrived, and apparently over in rapid time too.
Results: Jeff (green), Pat (blue): 31. Brian (red): 29. Alex (purple): “not recorded but less than 29″. I was to learn later than Alex’s score was even embarrassingly lower than 29. But let’s not dwell on that…

Oregon: Was played. Extensive game data follows.
Results: Lindsay: 66. Rick, Brad: 60. Nick: 57.

Amun Re: Quite a long game for just three players I think. Interestingly, in the first two rounds of the second era, all provinces drawn were ones that were not inhabited in the first era. And yes, the province cards were (apparently) shuffled between eras.
I couldn’t pick who was the likely winner throughout this game. But an interesting crunch came for Neil on the very last turn, in which he bid a whopping 24 gold for the sacrifice. This was important for him to nudge the production marker as high as possible. He could have bid significantly lower, still won the three-items contest, and also secured the most cash for a relative 6 point difference on me at the end, and perhaps the game win. But then again I don’t recall the farmer difference between us – I think I definitely had more. So who knows – maybe Neil would have won if he’d just bid a more modest $10 (or thereabouts) on that last sacrifice.
17 mins rules and setup; 78 mins game time.
Results: Paul (green): 43. Euhan (white): 42. Neil M (blue): 40.

SushiZock im Gockelwok: I thought this might have been a little trick that someone was playing on me. See, I had written “Cheeky Monkey” in my notes, because this was the title that had seen being opened and looked at on that table. Much later I checked my notes again and saw the following time and scores information written underneath, with Cheeky Monkey crossed out and this bizarre name written in its place. But, a click on the BGG link (the game title here) will take you there – it is indeed a real game (simply “Sushi Bar” in English).
17 mins.
Rick: 8. Lindsay: 6. Brad: 3. Nick: -1.

RoboRally: The Agricolans then leapt over several centuries, including the 21st, to program homicidal robots.
Results: Jeff: Declared the winner with 3 flags (or as good as). Pat and Alex on 2 each (although one or both of them dead). Brian on 1.

Galaxy Trucker: In the absence of any good economic development game being proffered at this time, I agreed to join Brad and Alex in the ship buildin’ and truckin’ experience.
In the first of 3 rounds I did ok compared to the others, but finished last in building my ship, therefore trailed in the race and the choice of goods from planetary visits. The same thing happened in the second round, although Alex made a tiny mistake in his setup that saw him lose about 40% of his ship before we’d even started.
Again in the 3rd round I was the last to finish shipbuilding, but was feeling quite good about it. But on the journey it did take some hits and I seemed to be losing pieces of my ship faster than the other guys. However, at the end I was surprised to see my ship in front on the race track, so the bonus and remaining pieces of cargo were enough to edge me ahead of the others. If only Alex’s engineers had checked their work ahead of that second run…!
13 mins setup and rules explan; 83 mins game time.
Results: Paul (green): 59. Alex (yellow): 51. Brad (pink): 50.

Nexus Ops: Translucent critters do battle.
Neil M: 11. Pat: 6. Jeff: 3.

Puerto Rico: The old favourite makes an appearance - maybe the second one for the year.
Results: Euhan, Lindsay: both 60, but Euhan nudges ahead 3-2 on the tie-break. Brian: 48. Rick D: 39.

Bluff: Pat fell off his chair (when he was knocked out the game first). Lindsay won with one die left. Then Euhan, then Jeff, then Rick.

Tichu: The last game of the evening for the remaining die-hards.
Pat and Paul defeated Jeff and Alex, 495 to 5, in about 4 hands and 28 mins.

Venue: Paul’s place
Present: Brad, Pat, Lindsay, Alex, Jeff, Richard, Brian, Paula, Paul.
Played: Oregon, Imperial, Agricola, Kuhhandel, Ra, Galloping Pigs.

It seems like ages since I’ve been in a regular games session, even though I and others got in a few games last week at Tommy’s (Citadels, Wits and Wagers), and a few 2p games have hit the table with the missus recently (Agricola, Java). But it was good having the crowd back here again for a combination of new and old games.

Oregon: This one is still kind-of new (< 2years!), and sticks in my mind because I won my first play of this at ConTrail this year. Still fun, but following my result in May, Richard demonstrates that this is obviously a game for newbies. Although Brad maybe blows that theory - this was his first game too...
15 mins rules and setup; 31 mins game time.
Results: Richard (yellow): 73. Pat (blue): 66. Paul (green) & Brad (red): 57 (tie-break in Paul's favour).

Imperial: This was the biggie for the evening - a new one brought along by Lindsay, although I understand it might be a re-print of an older game? Or am I misunderstanding the the discussion around this…?
It looks like it might be my kind of thing, so I look forward to having a go at this some time soon…
Sorry about the blurriness in the close-up pic. Bummer.
36 mins rules and setup; 115 mins game time.
Results: Alex: 143. Jeff: 140. Lindsay: 126. Brian: 112.

Agricola: “Five-player Agricola? Are you serious? The down-time will be a killer..!”
There being no other objections we rail-roaded over this one and got stuck in anyway. And as it turned out, the down-time, if any, was barely significant. There is so much information to absorb and process on the table and in your hand of cards that brief deliberations by opponents are generally tolerable.
In this game Richard seemed to grow his population and fill his farmland slightly faster than everyone else, hence I thought he was a likely winner. Maybe he would have got there if he didn’t have cook two cattle on his second or fourth-last turn…
On the other hand, Pat delayed his family growth until quite late in the game. However, he eventually made up for lost time by popping out babies all over the place and securing a full 15 points in family members with his last action. At least twice Pat beat me to the family-member-without-a-room action, so I stayed on three family members and used my last action, in combination with my Clay Seller occupation, to pick up a wad of clay and trade it in for sheep and pigs, and finish in the respectable placings.
After playing a few games now with my standard set, it was nice to play with Pat’s animeeples. Maybe I should look into getting these for my set some time…
30 mins rules and setup; 86 mins game time.
Results: Pat (blue): 35. Paul (white): 32. Richard (purple): 30. Paula (green): 27. Brad (red): 26 (or was it 17?).

KuhHandel: Bluffing, trading and set collecting (I believe).
5 mins rules and setup; 48 mins game time.
Results: Richard 1st, then Jeff, then Brian then Lindsay.

Ra: Four of us played this oldie-but-goodie while the others played Kuhhandel.
I’ve never felt particularly good at Ra. The other players always seem to time their run and their best bids far better than me, and throughout this game felt no different. Both Pat and Alex drew attention to the fact that after the first round I was out in front, But with Pat accumulating a vast collection of monuments I thought he would comfortably storm home. The turning point was almost certainly that one auction that featured a certain monument that would have given Pat his 4th in a set and therefore 15 points, but Alex gallantly threw himself in and bid 10 to deny him the prize (and, ultimately, let me win). Thanks Alex!
5 mins rules and setup; 34 mins game time.
Results: Paul: 31. Paula: 29. Alex: 28. Pat: 20.

Galloping Pigs: While the continued swinging the Kuh by the handle, we ended our evening riding pigs to victory. Rewarding stuff.
11 mins. Paul and Paula: 10 each; Alex: 4. Pat: 0.

tMSG turned three years old last month. And so I have some statistics to report, for the period Oct 7, 2007 through to Oct 6, 2008 inclusive:

• Total posts for this period: 56. This is down from last year (68), but this is largely because I reduced my Sunday night gaming, and therefore reporting, to an average of about 3 sessions per month since about July or August.
• Total no. game plays reported*: 387. This is actually up on last year’s number (from 362), which implies that collectively we are playing more games per session, and therefore also probably shorter games on average.
• Total no. unique games played: 203. (last year: 210 - probably not statistically different).
• No. unique, regular game players: 20^ (last year: 19).
• Approx. no. game hours: 290 (last year: 271).
  (ie., if you laid end-to-end all the games recorded in the last year, it would add up to 12.1 days continuous (last year: 11.3). But, only 76.5% of all games logged had the time recorded, so extrapolating the average would give 379 hours, or 15.8 days, for the 387 games reported.)
• Additional amount of time spent separately in rules explanation and game setup*: 49.4 hours (last year: 34.5).
  Total number of individual gaming experiences: 1493 (last year: 1540, so down a bit, but again there are a bunch of sessions not recorded, which certainly would have pushed the number way past this. As before, one gaming experience is one person playing one game. A 4p game is therefore 4 individual gaming experiences.)

(* As for last year, these data are from recorded game sessions only with the vast majority having me in attendance. There are obviously many more game plays of the group in this time that have not been captured.)

(^ A unique, regular player is defined as an attendee to Sunday night sessions who turned up more than once in the 12 month period. With visitors, who attended a single session only within that period, the number is increased by another 9 to 29. Last year I reported 32, but this was skewed by counting game opponents at the Albury expo, who arguably shouldn’t be included in the number, and this year were not. ie., the 9 ‘visitors’ actually participated in a ‘typical’ Sunday night session.)

Last year I also reported some web site traffic statistics, so here’s some comparative data. Over the past month the average no. site visits per day has been 15 (last Sept-Oct: 10.8), with an average of 4.31 pages per visit (last year:1.65), for a total of 2000 pageviews (last year: 536). This number is a little skewed, with a lot of traffic coming from one or a few sites in Auckland, New Zealand. Hi, Auckland…!

A better view is to look over a nine month period, as I reported last year. So over the past nine months, the total has been 3957 visits, for an average of 14.5 visits per day. 30.4% of these were from Australia, 23.4% from North America (20.6% from USA, ~3% from Canada), 20% from New Zealand (hi again, Auckland!), and 17.2% from Europe incl. all the eastern bloc countries.
This compares to the nine months to Oct 2007: 9.5 visits per day, with 46.4% from Australia, 31.9% from North America, and 16.3% from Europe.
Also as I reported last year, there are repeat visits from a large number of countries, over 30 in fact. Some of these are from places in Mexico, Israel, Sweden, Japan, and Ecuador. Last year I mentioned Hungary, Singapore, India, Brazil, and Peru, and all of these are in the mix this year too (although my visits from Peru were unique this time rather than ‘returners’).

The gaming-related highlights for the past year include our 3rd annual ConTrail weekend (especially that game of Brass we started at 1:35am - thanks again to the heroic participation of Craig and Neil M.).
There was also the Australian Games Expo at Albury - my second one of these, and this year I went with my whole family. Again, so many highlights, like catching up with Melissa and Fraser and the Z-Man, and other gaming personalities I met in ‘07 such as Giles P. and Neil T. The Boardgames Australia team also made themselves known to the world, announcing their inaugural winners, including Phil H. (Adventureland) with the Archaeology card game, who has since made it ’round for one Sunday night session with us. I hope to do it all again in ‘09, notwithstanding there is a generous chunk of 2008 still left…