Game(s) Played:
It’s the typical tragic story of most boardgamers who have young children and non-gamer wives. Really, really great games unfortunately end up collecting dust and suffering from the disease of "non-plays". Orleans is my guilty pleasure that I've been looking forward to since my first and last unfinished play from 9 months ago. Fortunately, Malaysia is rife with public holidays and I decided to take advantage of one public holiday whilst my daughter was off at her grandmother's to play Orleans with my brother and Padawan Babygeek playing house with a spare Player's trading stations.
Session – Orleans
Game: Orleans
Designer: Reiner Stockhausen
Players: 2 – 4 Players
Playing Time: 90 minutes (This Play: 90 minutes)
Main Mechanisms: Bag Building
Player(s):
I won't be doing a "Play Better" report because I've only had 1 play with 4 Players and 1 play with 2 Players and both plays were vastly different in terms of strategy and routes to win. When playing with 4 Players, Technology Tiles and Goods Tiles were terribly important because there were limited Character Tiles due to the higher Player count and of course the map becomes more congested making it more difficult to score Trading Stations on the map.
Typical problems of boardgames with any form of area control
So learning from my previous experience, I decided to go with the travelling farmer's strategy to gain tonnes & tonnes of Goods Tiles. I tacked on my first Technology Tile to the Ship action (the river routes were ripe with Brocades and Wool for some reason this year) and started pumping out tonnes of Farmers to gain as much +1 Coin per turn and use the Farmers for my newly minted Cheese Factory. No harvest event was going to get me. Everything was going so well, that was at least until the plague happened. Alexander Fleming only discovered antibiotics in 1928 after all.
I actually find the rule where the plague doesn't affect you if you pull a Character Tile of your color to be a bit unfair. I was going to house rule that you have to keep drawing a Character Tile until you get one that is not your color but lo and behold the plague event turned up as the second event, which meant we would definitely lose the only Character Tile we've gained in our first turn. Of the 3 plague event tiles that showed up, Moses only lost 1 Character Tile to the plague whilst I lost all 3. Talk about bad luck.
I'm not a cat person but I'm a cat's person
Moses did the smart thing in grabbing the Herb Garden (Fishermen = Craftsmen, Traders, and Farmers) then after fully upgrading the Knights Track to maximize his draws, he proceeds to drop Trading Stations all over the map before finally pushing his Development Status up with Scholars. Ultimately I should have stopped him by grabbing the Scholars first but I was so sure I would be able to make it up through Goods Tiles. My maths must have regressed significantly to believe addition can beat multiplication. Anyway, to make up for the first abysmal timelapse video of Orleans, here's a timelapse of Mo demolishing me at Orleans for your viewing pleasure.
Results Of Game(s)
The winner with today's mascot… Padawan Babygeek who is starting his winner pic training
Winner – Moses (Goods + Coins + Multiplier = 20 + 51 + 50 = 121 VPs)
LAST – Justin (Goods + Coins + Multiplier = 59 + 21 + 6 = 86 VPs)
Moses made a lot of Coins off the Fisherman Track as well as Trading Day & Income Events that came out at the later part of the game when he already had a LOT of Trading Stations and a high Development Status. This literally wiped out my advantage in Goods Tiles but I really should have done better to get a higher Development Status if only to block him out of getting a high one himself.
As the little Padawans get older, it would seem that it is getting somewhat easier to get more boardgame play time apart from SWAGamers (so long as Moses is still living in the vicinity and still interested to game I guess). We are already surprisingly at 41 Plays for the year, only 2 shy of the great 43 Plays of 2011 and with another 4 months left of SWAGamers I'm not surprised if we can hit the big 50 which would be a great year of gaming for me.
Until next time, keep calm and play better.
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