Game(s) Played:
Lord Of The Rings: The Confrontation
Lords Of Vegas
Olympus
I was at the Boardgame Night organised by The League with Kareem as the main man. To put it bluntly it was awesome! I think there were at least 5 tables of gaming going on at one point with probably around 20-25 people gaming. The number could be higher as I believe some people left early and others came late. I was third to arrive and took Kareem’s place at a freshly set up board of Lord Of The Rings: The Confrontation opposite Nicolas as Kareem had to open the door for other arrivals.
Session – Lord Of The Rings: The Confrontation
I sat on the Fellowship side of the table and took a quick survey of the board. I had nine characters from the Fellowship mounted on gate-like tiles facing me (hidden from my opponent) and nine cards (five +Strength cards and four special abilities). Each character has an ability of its own although the abilities for the Fellowship side involved either retreating or instant kills against specific characters from the Sauron forces which is actually surprisingly true to the movie. To offset this, Fellowship characters are incredibly weak compared to the Sauron Side. The game plays like chess with spaces on the board and attacking a Player simply involves moving your character into a space occupied by an opponent character. The Fellowship’s objective is to get Frodo into Mordor whereas the Sauron Side wins if three characters enter The Shire or Frodo is killed.
Apparently we played with the Deluxe Edition which actually looks nicer. I totally agree with the portrait style characters as opposed to the landscape ones of the previous editions.
So we got off to probing start, initially just moving pieces on our side of the board. I decided to spark things off with Boromir (self-destruct ability) by running him through the Caves of Moria right smack dab into the Balrog (defeats all characters using the tunnel) resulting in a double KO. Nicolas then used his Cave Troll to tromp up the board but I took it out with a Noble Sacrifice (self destruct) card using Aragorn I think. The next few moves were all very fortunate for me. Gimli (insta-kill Orcs) ran into Orcs, and then Nicolas’ Witch King ran into Merry (insta-kill Witch King) and I used Gandalf to pick off the remaining characters until only the Black Rider and Flying Nazgul were left. By this point Nicolas knew where Frodo was and unfortunately Frodo had barely left the Shire on his journey to Mordor (the lazy bum) and with the Black Rider & Flying Nazgul (teleport abilities) he made short work of Frodo with no Aragorn to protect him. What an EPIC alternate ending for the Fellowship.
Closing comments:
What a way to relive the adventures of LOTR! It plays quite a lot like chess with quaffable potions although I personally feel the Fellowship strategy seems to be quite limited (prod with characters having the retreat ability then insta-kill with the right character whilst hiding Frodo). Nevertheless it was a quick round of good fun with a come from behind win for the Sauron side.
As the curtains closed on the unfortunate adventures of Frodo and his band of merry friends, the next table had just finished setting up Lords Of Vegas and I shuffled along to join them!
Session – Lords Of Vegas
I thought I had gone from a strategy game to a dice infested luck fest but boy was I wrong. Taking a quick look at the board I noticed that it actually looks like a spruced up Acquire board (strange as that may sound), depicting a top down view of grid-style city streets and empty lots with excel like references (A1, B2, C3) and so on. So at the start, each Player draws a card and takes ownership of the empty lot referenced on the card. The Player can then upgrade the empty lot into a casino (with colour of your choice too) which are important because casinos give you money when a card with the corresponding colour is drawn, casinos also give you VPs based on the size of your casino & ultimately you need to own casinos to merge, expand and takeover bigger casinos. The premise of the game is rather simple, just be the person with the most VPs when the end of game card is drawn (shuffled somewhere into the third quarter of the draw pile) OR you could aim for 90 points! which I think I was shy by another 10 points or so.
Okay so it was more like 30 points to the magic winning 90.
Don’t have pictures from the night itself yet but this is what a merger would look like just before it happens.
Play quickly commenced although there sure as heck was a lot of rules clarification (mostly with regards to mergers, takeovers and determining who’s the BOSS because only the BOSS gets VPs). Initially however it seemed quite a peaceful venture, everyone hugging their own casinos and not treading on anybody’s toes, I believe this is partly due to the fact that no one seemed to know how to even initiate a takeover. Kareem actually dropped by quite a number of times wondering why our table seemed so subdued. And then suddenly it happened! Chee Wei (really hope I got your name right) changed his casino colour to merge with Melchor’s two lot purple casino effectively becoming the BOSS because his casino was die 5 (the number on the dice is determined on the board but can be rerolled by paying $1m x number on the dice, incidentally also the amount of $ you get when the corresponding coloured casino card is drawn) and Melchor’s was both below 3 I believe. Seeing a grand opportunity (I had two separate casinos sitting on both sides of Chee Wei’s now size three casino), I swapped both my casinos to purple and now had a whopping size eight casino with me as the BOSS because I had a die 6! (cue evil laughter track)
It was at about this time that suddenly the race for mergers and takeovers took place. Jeanne literally built a size eight casino in a single turn using all her Elvis Presleys ($10m notes had Elvis printed on them). Chee Wei was evil laughtering all over the board and Melchor was somehow aiming for having casinos on the strip (lots connected to the main street running through the middle of the board) waiting for the card that says “Pay The Strip" garnering close to $40m in two turns I think. I got very, very lucky as purple cards came up after I had done my merger followed by brown cards when I changed my casino to brown! Players took huge risks of upwards of $20m just for a chance to reroll all the dice and become the BOSS. Needless to say our table was the noisiest of the bunch, what with all the excited screams of “ONE! ONE! SIX! SIX!" and cackles of evil laughter. Quite a number of people stopped by to ask what the game was about. I’m so sorry if we were a bit rude when we responded “PAY MONEY!!" and burst out laughing.
Look at Melchor's greedy face hehe.
Closing comments:
It did get a bit draggy towards the end, although Melchor & Jeanne suddenly caught up to Chee Wei, we were looking forward to the end game card being drawn because our game was already reaching the 120 minute mark which is double the stated playing time. There also aren’t that many things to do towards the end as the casino tiles start to run out and it becomes really expensive to reroll or change casino colour. A lot of other people have commented on the paper money and how poker chips would have been far more sensible and I agree. The fiddly-ness certainly bogged us down a little bit and maybe poker chips with Elvis stamped on them would have been better.
Lords Of Vegas has dice in it, a LOT of dice and therefore the reference to a game of luck makes natural sense. Let me put it this way, when I was playing Lords Of Vegas I felt as if I was about to take my seat at a table but I had two choices: I could either be the House or I could be the Player. At all times you do know what the odds are and it is not like RISK where the outcome (despite the overwhelming odds) are limited to you losing only two armies a roll, au contraire, the results of say a massive reroll of all dice to takeover the casino can result in change of BOSS, loss of VP points & loss of income. So you could say, build small value casinos, link them up together and do a massive reroll (now that you have more dice than the other Players) and based on probabilities you should get higher rolls than other Players OR you could try your luck and hope your single die roll is higher than another Players’ five or six dice.
This isn’t to say there is no luck involved, there is. After all when the odds of something happening are a million to one in a Discworld novel, you might as well fold your hand. I got pretty lucky when my major merger took place at a time when it was very, very expensive to conduct a reroll by other Players, letting me hold on to quite a significant lead plus the fact that actually 2 out of 4 of my lots were “squatter lots" (meaning I forcibly pay to occupy another empty lot and when that lot’s card is drawn, I have to vacate for the rightful owner) and that I held on to them until the end of the game. And yes there are times when your one die rolls a six against the odds of another eight dice (after all it’s a 1/6th chance of happening). But really those are far and few between, and if it really does happen, the one with overwhelming odds can reroll again if he has sufficient $.
Lords Of Vegas is brilliant and coupled with last night’s company who were really great people, this was definitely the highlight of the evening for me.
With 30 minutes to go until curfew, I decided to give Olympus a try having seen it in Scott Nicholson’s video sneak peek.
Session – Olympus
Olympus has a humongous board and with all five Player slots taken, we had to open up another table else it all wouldn’t fit. The size is a little on the wee side of ridiculous actually especially when the font size on the cards are so small such that Melchor and I literally played our game standing up.
Here's the photo evidence.
Anyways more on that later. Olympus is primarily a card based game reminiscent of 7 Wonders but with a turn order system that is more of a RFTG variant and an ability system somewhat like Hansa Teutonica (there may be more similar games but I can only draw from my limited experience so far). So Players take turns to lead by placing one of the meeples on one of the action slots available. The lead Player gets to choose to take the more powerful version of the action and anyone else who chooses to follow places a meeple on the less powerful version of the action. This is important because the subsequent Player who leads cannot choose the same action once it has been taken by another Player and if all the action slots are already taken, the Player has wasted his remaining meeples, so it’s a balance between holding out for the more powerful version and potentially wasting an action or taking the weaker action. Ultimately, Players are looking to score the highest VPs which is marked on a VP track (unlike other games there is no end game scoring so the winning Player can be seen at all times). VPs can be earned through buildings or upgrading your abilities to maximum and once four different abilities have been upgraded thusly (regardless of which Player has upgraded) the game comes to a screeching halt.
As usual buildings break the rules and mostly help Players upgrade their abilities and get goods but what’s most unusual is that each Player has an identical deck of building cards. In that sense each Player forges their own strategy and is only hampered by other Players through the actions that can be taken. There are special buildings that are laid out on the board available to the first Player to build them but strangely enough they were not as hot as I believe they were intended to be, partly due to the fact that we were all new to the game. Ethan (again I hope I got your name right) having come from the Cyclades table took advantage of all our hippy love-and-peace approaches to dominate us militarily. It was bad despite the fact that we played a rule wrong whereby the Player who wins a battle takes ONLY one good from the losing Player as opposed to the correct rule: the winning Player takes goods equal to the difference between his military might and the losing Player’s.
Closing comments:
Olympus has one the ridiculously biggest scoring tracks I’ve ever seen (told you that’d be more of this later). I think they could have probably made the board 75% of the size it is now but hey I’m the guy with the short upper body height who can’t see anything so maybe it’s just me.
Plus the board isn’t flat as well.
In anycase, I came away from Olympus feeling “meh", admittedly this could be because I had just come from a high stakes, high interaction game of Lords Of Vegas but I think it’s mostly because I felt rushed to make decisions. Unfortunately this game is AP heaven simply because all of us were not familiar with the buildings deck and had to go through them one by one, coupled with the late hour plus maximum Players, I think I didn’t really give Olympus the justice it deserves in this one play. Certainly looking forward to another round but I’d advise all would be Players to have a read of the building cards online beforehand.
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