Billabong Boardgamers - 24th October, 2000
Present: Alan, Debbie, Donna, Craig, Karen, Roger, Steve
Debbie Pickett writes:
A small crowd tonight, in part due to the deluge of rain we've been having this week (66 millimetres at my place since the weekend). I arrived late to be dealt into a game of Sticheln, which we stopped when Donna arrived a little before 8 pm. The card-playing group set up Yet Another M? Game on another table while Steve introduced me to an old classic that I'd never played up to now.
COSMIC ENCOUNTER
Steve's version of this game was the Mayfair edition, plus all of its expansions and then some. I was very impressed at how much Steve managed to squeeze into the box.
I couldn't possibly begin to do justice to the rules, which I frequently got wrong. Suffice it to say that I was reminded somewhat of several games, most notably Wiz-War in the sense that it's a protect-your-own-and-expand-elsewhere kind of balance.
The game proceeded fairly calmly - as I imagine three-player games of Cosmic Encounter do - with Steve being hammered quite a bit by the destiny deck at first, much to the delight of Roger and me. In fact I was seldom hit at all, and kept almost all of my tokens - even more when I realized I was taking my attack token from my home bases rather than from the warp. Steve and Roger graciously allowed me to amend this after the fact by taking a couple of free tokens back from the warp.
The best play of the game was by Steve, who played a Disease flare (threatening to make Roger and me lose a bunch of cards and tokens), which Roger nullified with a flare zap, only to see Steve pull it back out of the discard deck with Space Junk and play it again!
The game ended when I got my fifth foreign base. Steve could have hitched a ride with me to earn a joint victory, but couldn't bring himself to do it in a mere three-player game.
Of our powers, Changeling and Xx were the most used, with Calculator and Parasite used once or twice with devastating effect and Prophet and Industrialist never used successfully.
Initial powers:
Roger: Changeling, Industrialist
Steve: Xx, Prophet
Debbie: Calculator, Parasite
Final scores:
Debbie: 5 foreign bases, no home bases lost
Roger: 4 foreign bases, one (maybe two) home base(s) lost
Steve: 4 foreign bases, three home bases lost
My rating: I'm not going to rush out and get the Avalon Hill version just yet. Partly I want to see how the game plays with more players - since Steve and others contend that it's better with more. In any case, this is an enthusiastic 6, perhaps a 7. Definitely one to play again.
Steve writes: I think CE plays best with 4-5 players. More powers in the game means more weird interactions between power effects, which is fun. Downtime is not such a huge issue in CE because of the alliance invitations keep you involved in the game even if you're not a main player. Nevertheless, 6 players and up can get a little slow, just because it takes time for all the allies to decide whether or not to commit to the challenge. Needless to say, 3-player game like ours fairly race along - and they can still produce thrilling games. (Cf the last time CE was played at BBG.) I've played - once - with ten players, with two rotating challenge cones and concurrent challenges, according to rules of my own devising. Highly chaotic.
Karen Babcock writes:
HARE AND TORTOISE
Alan, Craig, Karen, Roger, Steve
This board game (which is apparently Hare and Hedgehog in its German version) is a cute board game new to everyone except Roger.
To win the game, you must be the first to move your token the 64 spaces from start to finish. To move, you must spend carrots, with the cost rising exponentially so that moving 1 space costs 1 carrot, and moving all 64 in one go would cost 2016 (a few more than you'd normally have available -- I believe we started with 50). Along the way, you must eat three lettuce patches, and you can't cross the finish line with more than 10 x your finishing place in carrots.
The spaces on the board are of different types:
- Carrot patch: If you land on one of these, you get 10 carrots at the
beginning of the next turn. If you don't move off the space, you can give up
10 carrots instead (useful at the end of the game).
- Lettuce patch: If you land on one of these, you can spend your next turn
eating lettuce, getting rid of one of the three lettuce cards you received
at the beginning of the game. You also receive 10 x your place in the race
in carrots (so eating lettuce when you're in 5th place yields you 50
carrots).
- Numbers 2, 3, 4 & 1-5-6: If at the beginning of your next turn, your place
in the race matches the number you're on, you get 10 x your place in
carrots.
- Hares: When you land on a hare, you roll a die and then take an action
based on a grid that factors your roll against your place in the race.
Actions can be good (eat a lettuce, take another turn), bad (lose a turn),
or "it depends". Early in the game, Craig got to the first lettuce patch,
then moved ahead to a Hare space. His roll told him to "move back one
position", which meant he had to move back to the first space behind the
next player behind him. As it happened, that was the lettuce patch, which
meant he got to get rid of his second lettuce card very early in the game.
- Tortoises: You land on these by moving backwards from your current space. You get 10 x the number of spaces you moved in carrots. You can only move to the nearest Tortoise in a single turn.
Craig, Karen, and Roger managed to dispose of at least two of their lettuce cards fairly early in the game (much to Alan's dismay). At the beginning of the game Karen trailed the pack and landed on the 1-5-6 spot and ate a lettuce patch while in last place, giving her lots of carrots to allow for some big hops. Alan, on finding the early lettuce patches occupied, moved ahead, stopping to fuel up on carrots, hoping to get rid of lettuce cards at the lettuce patches near the finish line. Roger also moved ahead of the pack, using Tortoise squares to fuel his moves. Steve stayed behind and took advantage of the Tortoise and 1-5-6 squares to build up a stockpile of carrots, but had too much distance to make up. Craig, having disposed of his lettuce cards quickly, moved forward at a steady pace, but took a gamble on a Hare space and wasted a turn eating lettuce when he didn't need to. Near the end of the game, Karen leapt over Roger while he was on a lettuce patch, so that he received 20 carrots rather than the 10 he had expected. This meant he had too many carrots to cross the finish line, allowing Karen to scamper across in first place, using 21 carrots to move the required 6 spaces, leaving her with only 1. Roger then followed, since in second place he could have up to 20 carrots while crossing the finish line. Craig was next, followed by Alan and Steve.
The dynamics of the game are very interesting -- you get carrots for moving backwards, and you earn more carrots for eating lettuce when you're behind in the race than when you're ahead. Landing on a numbered square can get you carrots -- unless someone jumps ahead of you or behind you, so you're not in the position you expected to be at the beginning of your next turn. The Hare spaces add a nice touch of randomness, which you can avoid if you want. A fun game.
Alan Stewart writes:
STICHELN
An opening game, as we weren't sure how many people would be attending.
First hand: Craig, Steve, Roger, Alan, Karen
This saw Roger leap to a huge lead, but then Debbie arrived and we realised we had been scoring wrong!
After that the agme was a bit more sensible, with only Craig receiving a pile of negative cards, and I forgot that we were playing you had to follow suite even if all you had was a 0. In one of the hands, 4 players had Green as their negative suite.
Craig -16 +7=-9 +4=-3
Steve 7 +16=23 +11=34
Roger 1 +5=6 +29=35
Debbie 9 +10=19 +15=34
Alan 11 +21=32 +11=43
Karen 13 +6=19 +2=21