In which MetalJim plays awesome board games for three whole days…

This year’s Tennessee Game Days event in Nashville was a roaring success.  We had a good turnout of more than 75 total attendees, with more than 40 die-hards were in the room for most of the weekend.  Jumping into game was always a piece of cake.

It’s a hallmark of a good boardgaming con that even while you are playing some super-awesome new game that you wanted to try, or some super-cool classic, you look around the room and say, “Wow!  I can’t believe people are playing that!  Cool!  I wish I was playing that!”  After the weekend, you think, “Wow, I got to try out some super-awesome games, but there are lots of awesome new games that I still need to try!”

Some highlight and some thoughts…

Doing my part to help this con, I taught a couple of groups how to play In the Year of the Dragon, which is the newest Alea Big Box game.  I like the game a lot, though it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and it can be frustrating for folks who make a big mistake or two during their first game.  My Friday morning session was a complete success, however, and I was shocked to see the guy who had been in last place the entire game suddenly explode during end-game scoring and win the game.  It was a win that surprised everyone, but we all agreed it was well deserved.

I also taught some folks how to play San Marco, and that was good fun as well.

I was also on the receiving end of some good gaming service.  Nice people taught me how to play some very complex games.  First up…

Through the Ages – This is a “Civilization” card game.  It’s a little abstract because it has no map.  Yes, you can have Joan of Arc defending the pyramids (good combo, actually).  It’s also a really, really, long game, but it flows along pretty nicely.  It’s a little weird because you have lots of little blue tokens that can be either generic resources if they are sitting on one card, food cubes if sitting on a farm, or mineral cubes if sitting on a mine.  There’s also a nice mechanic where you get a small reward for putting certain events into the event deck, only to be surprised when the event that YOU chose comes up a few turns later, and you are no longer prepared for it.

In my three player game, I was competitive in victory points through most of the second age.  However, we ended up playing the full and complete game (totally worth the extra length, by the way).  My mining technology was completely inadequate for the modern world, and I got blown out in the end.  For a game with so many gosh-darn cards with a lot of different special powers, it’s amazing how well balanced the game seems to be.  I saw a great discussion on BGG last night trying to evaluate which of the game’s leaders is the “best” or “unbalanced”, and there was no clear winner. 

You might wait until later this summer for the third printing of Through the Ages.  Then, play it with three players, with someone there to help teach you the game (the game supports four, but the sweet spot for game length seems to be three players).  After one play, give it a second go.  Make sure that at least one of your games is the full game with the third age included.  It’s totally worth the time that you put into it.

Agricola – This is the new game that has worked it’s way into top 5 on BGG.  The US edition hasn’t even been properly released yet (maybe by the end of June).  I was lucky to have an Agricola fan-boy happily teach the game to five new players (well, one guy had kinda played once before).  In short, this is a game where you start off with two farmers and not much else.  Your goal is to make a prosperous farm and a successful living for your family.  It is a lot of fun, and not that hard to learn the rules.

I played the “dumbed down” family version of Agricola, which is still pretty awesome.  The advanced version gives each player an extra hand of cards at the start, which would be a little overwhelming at a table of new players.  In my game, I watched in round one as other players scooped up the wood tokens to start building fences so that they could raise animals.  I got pushed into a farming track, and ending up having to take a “begging” penalty card at the end of round one because I couldn’t feed both my farmers.  The reason I couldn’t feed my dudes was that I chose to plant my grain rather than eat it.  The rewards in the long run were worth it.  I never went hungry again, and I never really faced any competition over the course of the game for the planting supplies and actions that I needed.  I was the winner with 29 points.  Second place was 22 points, and everyone else was in the teens.  This game was my #1 personal winning highlight of the weekend.

Is Agricola the best game ever?  It does take up a lot of space on the table.  As you are learning the game, it is a little overwhelming to consider all of the different things that cause you to gain and lose points (wait – I need a vegetable token at the end?  WTF?).  There is a slight problem with the start player mechanic: in my game, the guy to my right kept grabbing the start player token with one of his actions, so I usually had excellent choices without having to pay anything extra to get there.  Despite these very minor criticisms, I would say that Agricola is a very solid game that probably does belong in the top 20 on BGG.  How high it goes on that list is for you to decide.  If a tight paced German game about family farmers appeals to you at all, then you definitely need to try this.

Now, on to some “lowlights” of the con…

Thebes – otherwise known as Jenseits von Theben.  This is one of those games that you really WANT to like.  It has a great theme about early 1900s era archaeologists searching for clues about lost civilizations, then going around digging for artifacts.  The bits all look really nice.  At first, the mechanics seem fresh and engaging.  The first time you pull a cool artifact out of one of the bags, you will tell yourself how much you love the game and how much you need to buy it.  Then, it all starts to go terribly sour.  By the end of the game, you have enough reasearch “skill” to take ten pulls at a time out of one artifact bag.  However, by that time there are only 2 or 3 useful artifacts left in the bag, and sixteen blank tiles, just like at the beginning of the game.  In the final phases of the game, it seems like you are just raking through the dirt that other people have left behind, scrounging for what’s left.  It boils down to who can get lucky by having the right cards come up on their turn, and who can grab the “winning” tiles out of the bag during the later turns. 

Thebes is the sort of game that you end up really hating precisely because of how much you WANTED to love it when you sat down to play.  This issue is deserving of its own blog article at a later date.

Bad sportsmanship – Uh-oh.  I played with a lot of really, really cool people this weekend, and I will see many of the same folks next month at the Oasis of Fun.  However, I also witnessed one moment of shocking immaturity and bad sportsmanship.  It’s the sort of thing that it surprising precisely because the crowd who plays these games and goes to these cons prides itself on playing games with integrity.  In short, I was playing a game of Medici where a guy browbeat another player into turning over a third tile at a time when only one person (the guy doing the shouting) could benefit.

Now, it’s one thing to say to a player, “Hey, you really should turn over a third tile!” even when everyone who knows the game can clearly see that such a statement is practically a joke, since it is obvious that only one player (the guy talking) has room on his boat for three tiles, and would get all three for $1.  If a newbie falls for the trap, it is disappointing, but life goes on.  However, when the guy making this outrageous suggestion leans across the table and TURNS THE TILE OVER HIMSELF, then that is a shocking act of immaturity.  The guy who had his own turn violated didn’t really seem to care – he was the newbie and by that point I think he just wanted the game to end, and didn’t really appreciate that the guy who flipped the tile for him had basically just stolen the game.  At first, I was too stunned to react, thinking I was watching a joke that had gone on too long.  By the end, I told the guy in question that I considered it cheating.  I’m not sure if he learned the lesson or not.

Just because a guy has a beard and is pushing forty, doesn’t mean that guy is actually mature.

That’s enough for one week.  I could list every single game that I played in excruciating detail, but suffice it to say that I played a bunch of awesome games for three straight days and had a super-awesome time.  Let’s hope the Nashville folks can keep this event going for years to come.