The Mine Shaft Gap

Venue: Brian’s place
Present: Andrew, Alex, Jeff, Steve, Richard, Paul
Played: Set Cubed, Ra: The Dice Game, Roll Through the Ages, Im Reich der Wüstensöhne, Clans, No Thanks, Paul’s Prototype.

Brian had brought back some new stuff from his recent trip to the US, incl. Set Cubed, Ra the Dice Game, and the materials for a new, quick abstract game. I’ll say nothing more about the latter, except that Brian and Andrew were completely successful in hiding the novelty feature of the components from me and then taking me by surprise with it on my first play…

Set Cubed: This is a dice variation on the abstract set-making card game, then merged with Scrabble. Sets (of cubes), once rolled up, are placed on a grid, with bonus points for some of the spaces. New dice are drawn from a bag for each play.
30 mins.
Results: Andrew: 27. Brian: 22. Alex: 20. Jeff: 19.

Roll Through the Ages: The second dice game for the night, played on the other table. While I felt that I knew what I was doing in this game, there was certainly no strategy or planning in any of my play. I took the Irrigation development early (first turn, in fact) and this served me well, as I suffered not a single disaster for the whole game. My last turn play to earn an Empire was a rewarding one at 14 points, but the final result demonstrated that I probably needed a bit more focus on Monuments.
About 20 mins.
Results: Richard: 34. Paul: 29. Steve: 28.

Ra: The Dice Game: The third dice rolling game for the night, played by the Set Cubed gang on the other table. From only a brief glimpse this looks quite attractive, so I wouldn’t mind having a go at this some time…
Three epochs.
Results: Alex: 51. Andrew: 43. Brian, Jeff: 36.

Im Reich der Wüstensöhne: In continuance of Richard’s apparent obsession with deserts and camels (see recent plays of Timbuktu and Oasis) comes this baby from Klaus ‘Settlers‘ Teuber. Ride your camels around the desert, draw tiles to create oases, and ‘populate’ these with variable height tokens to claim the goods (and other benefits) after the oasis is enclosed. Turns out we got the rules slightly wrong with the playing of tiles at the edges, hence we ended up playing our own unofficial variant.
Never mind. Great game anyway. And I’ll have to insist Richard plays Yspahan and Durch die Wüste sometime soon to complete the set.
14 mins rules & setup; 84 mins game time.
Results: Steve (orange): 34. Paul (white): 31. Richard (red): 24.

Clans: Played by the Ra dicers while camelling continued on our table. Short, close game, except for Alex, who apparently played too…!
~10 mins rules & setup; 15 game time.
Andrew: 46. Brian: 45. Jeff: 44. Alex: 32.

No Thanks: Played by the Ra dicers/Clanners while camelling continued to continue…! I don’t have any data on this one; will have to update with Alex’ help later.

Paul’s Prototype: Great to have another go at this with ‘real’ playtesters (instead of my virtual ones on a spreadsheet) since making some important changes. Even more importantly, the ‘feel’ of the game play, and my testers’ feedback, is the most promising I’ve had. This despite Jeff’s completely unexpected and bizarre play strategy, in attempt to ‘break’ the game. He wasn’t successful in this (ie., it withstood the break test), but he did flush out a tiny rules ambiguity for me - thanks Jeff. I’ll add this to the FAQ, but no, for the record the Surplus Market points benefit of Tourism and Retail is not cumulative with multiple tiles! Also, I think I’ll introduce a hard limit on accumulated unpaid loans of 6 per player! (No-one else will know what that means until the game is actually published, which, thanks to tonight’s testers, is now a small step closer to reality.)
Some more rules mods to try, and the game ran over expected playing time by about half an hour, but I’m feeling much more positive about this.
30 mins rules & setup; 130 mins game time.
Results: Alex (yellow): 32. Jeff (green): 31 (really 29). Brian (red): 27. Paul (purple): 22.