It has been a busy period in my life with most of my weekends taken up by either work or church and so our monthly game day has been on a break since our last meeting in March. Despite it being the school holiday season, enough of us were left to be able to meet up at KFC to get some gaming into our systems & quench the fire in our blood.
Game(s) Played:
Dominion
Coal Baron
Session – Dominion
Player(s):
Jimmy
Justin
Louanna
I knew Mo was running late so I thought I’d introduce Jimmy & Louanna to the now legendary boardgame, Dominion. I say this because playing Dominion against Mo is no fun at all (endless +Actions anybody?).
I play a Shanty Town, draw some Gold & oh look, another Shanty Town, play that draw some Gold & oh look......
The teaching process went swimmingly, plus I even got to explain some of the card synergies as well. The great thing about Dominion is how simple the basic steps are, that even Jimmy & Louanna were doing 3 second turns in their first game & it isn’t difficult to copy a good move that another player does since Kingdom Cards rarely run out so fast in the game.
Jimmy considering buying the Tribute action card (which he did & bullied me with it)
Louanna the "Coppersmith" managed to buy a Province using 4 Coppers! Talk about a rare move
My winning deck with 38 VPs using a combination of Upgrade, Bridge & Courtyard
Time Taken: 30 minutes
Results Of Game(s)
Winna – Justin (38 Points)
Second – Jimmy (32 Points)
Dead Last – Louanna (23 Points)
Rating: 8/10
Sometimes you just need to revisit an old game after an interim period to rediscover its shininess & the reason why it literally flew off the shelf and into your hands, especially when you have made a hundred plays of the game. Tip: Play it with someone who's never played it before! Mo & I literally played ten games a night of Dominion before bed until he discovered Shanty Town & then we figured out how to play Race For The Galaxy instead. Playing Dominion with Jimmy & Louanna was a wonderful rediscovery all over again.
Session – Coal Baron
Player(s):
Jimmy (Orange)
Justin (White)
Louanna (Blue)
Mo (Red)
In my previous session report on Coal Baron, I wrote "I'm a little pissed at myself for not playing better so rather than spouting off some rambling about how broken the game is, I'm going to reserve my final thoughts after a few more plays (and definitely with more Players)" as an ending comment. At least I had the good judgment to reserve my comments on Coal Baron at the time because playing it with 4 Players has opened up my eyes to how good the game is.
The increased Player tension, too many factors to compute, planning 6 moves ahead... Ah the bliss
Let me just summarize what has changed my opinion after playing a 4 Player game of Coal Baron.
STOP that runaway leader!
The runaway leader problem is more easily contained by simply having other Players gang up to reduce the leader's majority. It is not surprising how easily this is achieved because like many other "production" themed Euros, Coal Baron requires Players to run their production engine within a tight constraint of turns which in turn opens up many opportunities for Players to "spoke" each other's wheels, so to speak.
WHO has majority now?
With more Players, the question of who has majority over what becomes difficult to answer making Coal Baron more exciting & thrilling right up to the last scoring phase. This is despite us house-ruling to play with our delivered order cards open too.
These may seem like trivial factors but the truth is that Coal Baron is a really well designed Worker placement, set collecting Euro, it just needed that extra factor of additional Players to turn me on to it. Hence we shall never, ever play 2 Player Coal Baron ever again.
Mo (right) is clearly enjoying himself here whilst Jimmy (left) ponders over how much more dominant he can be over black coal
At the end of the second shift I manage to retain my control over being Start Player into the third shift whilst contending with Louanna (right) on the scoring track
Here we are halfway into the third and final shift when things get really heated up
I end up having 2 Workers left, 1 fully stocked & undelivered order. Mo who comes after me (we were playing in counter-clockwise order) had 1 Worker, 3 fully stocked & undelivered orders and we were both fighting for the exact same still empty delivery space. If I put 1 Worker in the canteen & let Mo take the delivery, he has a fighting chance to beat Jimmy which is what our pseudo alliance was all about until this moment. By doing so, I forfeit my chance to occupy the delivery space (you need to place +1 Worker to the number of Workers already on the space) & probably consign myself to last place.
In a rare contrary moment of my character, I took the spot & launched myself to second, consigning Mo to third place. Which goes to show that boardgames somehow bring out the true nature of a person (whether the person denies it or not) & teaches us to always not be greedy and deliver only what you can or suffer not delivering at all.
The end of the game
And now for our famous "We're playing it wrong!" section! Well we got the random Tunnel Tile & Order Card space wrong by allowing the Player to pick only one random Tile / Card instead of choosing from five. Something else we got right this round that we now realize we got wrong the last time was that you can use two cubes as a substitute for a cube you don't have (surprisingly huge game changer this one). Well at least it wasn't like this session here...
Courtesy of the incredible Bill Watterson
Time Taken: 90 minutes (including set-up plus explanation)
Results Of Game(s):
Winna – Jimmy (111 Points)
Second – Justin (104 Points)
Third – Mo (88 Points)
Dead Last – Louanna (80 Points)
Rating: 8/10 (only with 4 Players)
Coal Baron is a game about picturing the end in mind & then achieving it in the course of one shift (approximately 10 turns) whilst dodging bullets from other Players at the same time. Despite that, the screwage is actually not so heavy (unless they take a Tunnel Tile / Order Card you want) because you can simply use the space later by just adding one more Worker, so keep a buffer of a turn or two to meet your goals and you should be fine. A house rule was proposed where a Player can place any number of Workers on the space but I think violence not unlike the above would quickly ensue.
Overall, Coal Baron is a great game for 4 Players. It doesn't break any new ground so to speak but is a well designed Euro that combines a number of different mechanisms seamlessly. Quick to play (except when a Player is fiddling with his mine, which is actually quite fun) with no complicated rules, just don't try it with 2 Players the first time.
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