To many board gamers out there, our spouses / significant others / soul mates look at our hobby and probably shake their heads in wonder at our engrossment, intense focus and long, time consuming, sleepless nights devoted to worker placement, resource gathering, victory point scoring and perhaps the most time consuming objective of all, world domination. For some of the fortunate ones out there, our loved ones do take that base-jumping leap of faith and give our hobby a try and I felt it to be such a momentous occasion for me that I had to blog about it.
Session Report:
Date: 14 November 2010, 2100 hours
Location: Home
Games: Le Havre, Dominion: Intrigue
I don't have an extensive collection. I own some party games to pass time / break the tension at real parties and the rest are games I truly love (in order of which love came first): Titan, Grass, Race for the Galaxy (+2nd expansion), Dominion: Intrigue, Dungeon Lords and Le Havre. Based on this available choices, I selected Dominion: Intrigue and Le Havre as the test cases for tonight. My wife doesn't have much love for... dare I say it... "normal" board games i.e. Monopoly, Risk, Scrabble, Pictionary. So it really surprised me that she said she would play 1 game with me this weekend. I think she noticed that I'm suffering withdrawal symptoms as my regular gaming group is on hiatus due to 1 member having to study for the dreaded Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia.
We started with Le Havre because I was still busy setting it up when she came to the table. (** Also because I hoped that if she thought Le Havre to be too complicated she might warm up to Intrigue more. So terrible-la me)
Le Havre:
I spent about 10 minutes giving a very summarized rules explanation, there was some hiccups in my explanation of building buildings and ships because she didn't understand "You need to enter a building (Building / Construction Firm) to build another building and enter a building (Building / Construction Firm) to build a Wharf to build a ship." I learned a good lesson here that I shouldn't try to summarize the rules too much for my next group, it can be a bit hard to swallow in a single sentence.
Round 1
The 1st round breezed past swimmingly. My wife took a clay from the offer to build the Charcoal Kiln which is a good deal for 8 quick points. I built the Marketplace thinking to get started on my Grain and Cattle early. She took a franc offer and a fish offer subsequently whilst I began to stock up on other resources.
End of 1st round: My wife has the Charcoal Kiln (8 points) and 7 francs. I have Marketplace (6 points) and 4 francs. I have to mention this because at this point, my wife declares she has won because her score is 15 against my 10. Dismay quickly follows when I explain to her there are 13 more rounds to a 2 player game. She offers to play a few more rounds but I convince her that we can move on to Intrigue and my heart will not be broken if we stop Le Havre at Round 1. I was already quite happy I could have a chance to explain Le Havre and all its wonders to my wife and saw no reason why I shouldn't quit while I was ahead :P Perhaps Le Havre is too big a leap for a non-gamer and I think its a gamer's habit to show off our favorite every chance we get.
Dominion: Intrigue:
I never realized deck building can be such a hard concept to explain to a non-gamer. My current group are all ex-MTG players so I guess I've been fortunate in that aspect. It took some time to explain that coinage is not a one-time use only and that spending 6 coins on Gold is not a loss making investment. The significance of action cards and why collecting victory points cards (buying spree of estates from the get go) is not such a great idea also took some time to sink in.
So I choose some of the simpler Kingdom Cards (i.e. Pawn, Steward, Courtyard, Baron, Mining Village etc.) and we forged ahead. I went ahead with an Mining Village / Conspirator strategy and just suggested to my wife to buy whatever struck her fancy as she was having trouble with the buy phase. And as she played different action cards I explained to her what they did. She seemed to favor treasure, victory cards and the Great Hall and I must admit that I felt a great sense of pride :) when she mentioned that she shouldn't clog up her deck with victory cards so early when she started getting poor draws.
When I heard her say (for the second time) that the game seems to go on and on, I suggested we stop. This would be after approximately 10 turns each, right after we each bought a Province in our previous turn. Her reaction was "What!?!?" when I told her the treasure cards don't count towards her final score. She said it doesn't make sense that a player spends so much time collecting the treasure cards and not score anything for it. Thinking back, that kinda goes against the whole euro-gaming system... we worker place, resource gather, build economic engines... as a means to an end (victory points).
Final Score:
Wife wins for stocking up early on Estates. End score 22 - 12.
Overall Results:
Le Havre (Wife wins)
Dominion: Intrigue (Wife wins)
Hmmmmmm, now I'm beginning to wonder if she made us stop whilst she was ahead......
She was surprised when I commented to her on Le Havre’s ranking on BoardGameGeek while I was packing up. She seemed interested in how the ranking system works and mentioned ranking factors like sales and whether its good money to be a game designer which made me think again about how different the board gaming community is to the corporate world. An industry designed by gamers, for gamers, all for the passion of a little understood hobby. We discussed a little bit about how a game's rank is determined when some really good games have smaller audiences and merely good games that target wider audiences do better in the rankings. All in all, I think this was one of the most interesting sessions I've ever had and I love my wife all the more for trying to understand my hobby :) Hopefully there will be more to come as she has expressed an interest in Acquire which I bought for a friend as a birthday present recently.
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