Participants: Jon, Nadine, Aaron, Haim S
Small game night.
Village
Aaron 50+, Jon 50-, Nadine 47, Haim 36
First plays for Aaron and Haim, third plays for Nadine and me. This is a frustrating interesting game that has a number of different strategies to explore. You can’t follow all of them, so – if you try something new – the game plays very differently. And yet, in the end, you come out to roughly the same number of points. Either the game is well balanced, too balanced, or hard to figure out.
I’m kind of enjoying trying to figure it out, in the meantime. I don’t know if Aaron and Haim liked it too much. Haim took the opportunity as first player to take the “first player next round” token a lot, which essentially often let Aaron be first player. Turn order on the first turn gives a slight advantage to those who go first, which is a minor problem with the game, but not a real problem. Which brings me to my only real problem with the game:
I loathe the mechanic where one person, instead of taking a cube off of the board, can pay three cubes to take an action. Not because you can take an extra action, but because this gives some other player an extra turn, which is just highly unfair and annoying. Yes, it’s part of the mechanics, but it’s a mechanic that I despise, and it is so easily fixed. Just make any person doing this first take a cube, like happens in Suburbia and so on. In this way, paying three cubes for an extra action doesn’t add to the overall number of actions. if that gives too much benefit to the person paying the cubes, you can have him take and throw out the cube.
I am definitely playing with some variation of that from now on.
Tichu
Jon/Aaron+, Nadine/Haim
I didn’t finish the last round when it was obvious that we had won.
