Kobayakawa

Kobayakawa is a minimalist betting tactical game. The Pico of Poker (as it was described to me). The game antes one coin, and then deals each player a card, plus flips a card face up.

Going (once) around the table you can either:

• Draw a card, then keep one card (hidden) and reveal the other (discarding it).
• Replace the face up card in the center (you flip up the top one and replace, no choice).

After this, there’s one round of betting. You can bet or fold. After everyone bets, you reveal. The lowest revealed card gets to add the center card to theirs. Highest value wins. (Under the gun winning ties). That’s it.

Another clever micro game. Not sure how deep this is but worth playing a few times. I don’t think there’s really much bluffing in this, but I only played it once. It’s tactical. And, yes, a card game. Getting hand after hand of middle cards is not the way to win.

I think you could be a great poker variant with this idea. (Imagine hold em where the worst revealed hand got to add the previously visible 8th card to their hand….)

Rating — Suggest (due to Novelty, we’ll see).

Star Realms

There’s a lot of game in this small package.

Star Realms is PvP Ascension. You have 5 cards you can buy, and cards give you money and combat. Combat attacks your opponent (you start with 50 Authority Life). Cards are in various factions, in most have an ability if you’ve played another card of that faction. Some cards (bases) stick around between turns and can be attacked instead of the opponent.

This seems (to me) like the type of game I could spew a few thousand words on. But for now, a few thoughts:

• The <Annoying Waiter Voice> wafer thin </Annoying Waiter Voice> cards have mismatched backs. I sleeved my copy.
• Even paying for sleeves it’s still under $30, but that basically doubled my cost.
• I do like the starting rules — first player gets a 3 card hand for the first turn. Interesting, and means that sometimes the 2nd player has the advantage.
• This is a pringles game, you can play a few games in a row. And (like Ascension) has easy setup/teardown.
• There’s clearly skill, but when playing games against the TaoLing I had a horrible early start and said “This is the one I lose badly.” (Going second when the starting board had a great 2 cost card, and a great 4 cost card, and my draw had … $3. Watched the TaoLing buy the 2 cost and it got replaced with nothing special). That’s fine, it’s a card game and takes 20 minutes.

Ascension had already fallen to indifferent, but I’m Enthusiastic about Star Realms.

The 50th anniversary of Churchill’s Death

… was yesterday. There’s a fine remembrance by Boris Johnson.

Apart from being a central character in one of the (the?) most popular gaming topic in history, Churchill represented a different age. Even in his own time he was an anachronism. In many ways he was the Last Victorian, clinging desperately to The Empire in an age of colonial independence. Despite this, he was also a futurist: He played a pivotal role in the development of the tank, radar and atomic weapons (in that one of his close advisors quickly grasped the potential in the thirties, appraised Churchill, and passed information and people to the US).

He was not a great strategic thinker. He wasn’t a consistent thinker. But he had so many ideas that some of them were great. And he consistently voiced warnings about the Nazi Menace, when the rest of the world tried to bury its head in the sand. You can argue about his accomplishments (and disasters), but you cannot deny that he was singular.

We no longer seem to have interesting, accomplished politicians. Churchill lived in an age where you could offend people (he certainly did) and still be elected.  Compare him to the average politician with 20+ years in Congress or Parliment today.

• Churchill was an accomplished painter.
• He served as a soldier (Churchill participated in the “Last great Cavalry charge of the British Empire,” he was a prisoner of war during the Boer Wars, although he escaped and later complained to Prime Minister Botha that the reward put on his head had been pitifully low).
• He was widely respected in the Navy for his stints as First Lord of the Admiralty.
• He was also a pilot very early on (back when each flight had a significant chance of death).
• He switched parties multiple times. (“Anyone can be a rat, but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat.” — WSC).
• He personally added brick rooms and guest areas to his house (Chartwell).
• Despite opposing many politicians, he seemed to genuinely like many of them (Hitler being the obvious exception). He got along quite well with Irish revolutionaries.
• He made a successful living as a writer (in fact, he’d have gone bankrupt without it).
• And he is one of the greatest Orators the world has seen; certainly the greatest in English

Of course, he had significant advantages. He certainly was “born on third base” but nobody can say he rested on his accomplishments. My main non-fiction reading of the last year (or so) has been The Last Lion. It is quite long (3 volumes) but fascinating throughout, for its glimpse into several different ages and one spectacular life.

Recommended

PS — Churchill, of course, really did say many of the things attributed to him. But one anecdote that you probably haven’t heard. While a teenager he went around campus (Harrow?) with his childhood Nanny (“Woom”). He had been bullied during his early schooling, yet he introduced her to his classmates and did not make any attempt to hide the fact that she had raised him. Since teenage boys are still mostly the same from times past, one of his classmates later called it “one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen.”

Edit — Thanks to Jeff G for pointing out some stuttering/missed words.

I’m surprised I haven’t seen this before

The new X-Com apparently requires a downloaded app.

This was on my mind because it seems to me that Space Empires could really use an app for book-keeping to avoid would avoid honest mistakes, such as accounting or remembering which ship counters have which technologies. (And cheating, of course).

Anyway, an app is by itself neither good or bad, but I can see it being a boon for some games (and a tedious draw for others). I’m old enough [1] that it’s not a draw, as I prefer to know the underlying systems of the game, but I do think that more apps that streamline said systems would be nice. I personally use the Mage Knight Dummy player app, as it saves me a few minutes of time each game.  But I happen to like my games without technology, mostly. Still, I expect that there will be at least one brilliant game in the next few years that integrates board and app.

[1] Four and half decades today.

[2] And I do remember hearing about that Knizia Excalibur board game that had electronics integrated into the board, but I never recall seeing it. I wonder if it was actually published or just vaporware. This must have been a decade ago.

Machi Koro + Harbor

… works well as a two player filler. Not deep, but some thought involved.

Variant I now will always recommend — There must be at least 4 blue/green buildings numbered 1-6 in the opening. (For more players, I may make this 2n). It’s brutal to go last and not have any purchase that improves your position, ditto for second round.

I also removed 2 sets of purple buildings (for 2 player, I should probably remove one more).  I’m tempted to remove a few Cheese Factories (and maybe Flower Store) since these only score as multipliers based on a single building (in the current set). So often they are worthless. I may just ban those from the opening setup.

Space Empires 4x

Look, this is a gloriously retro game, with accounting, spreadsheets and charts.

It’s fun.

It’s not everyone’s fun. Jim Krohn took the old school ideas and kept the great core while eliminating cruft. (Although I suppose the advanced rules and expansions let the cruft back in, if you like them). SE4x is the old Star Trek episode, Balance of Terror. Your fleet advances towards the neutral zone. Enemy ships are moving towards your colony. One blip, but is it a scout? Or a fleet? It’s joined by another blip. Or is it a decoy? The combined fleet is moving towards your outpost. And those other blips?

Your scientists have put great effort into your shields and phasers, so perhaps … suddenly the blips move two hexes. The enemy has better warp engines! They’ll get past your main fleet and ravage your outpost before you can get there.

And that’s SE4x. In my learning (2p) game, I built a fleet of scouts and cruisers with good technology, destroyed the enemy forward base and then a string of 4 more colonies. It was a great fleet. So great, in fact, that it had cost my me entire early production advantage and left the homeworld with a string of decoys and starbases. The enemies main fleet advanced on my rampaging marauders, but they had 5 more turns of new technology. Should I attack them or head home and upgrade? I’d gotten a forward post. I furiously through all my economy into homeworld defence, but those blips…. they were real and they arrived at Earth before I could defend it, and so I lost.

Total time — 3hours, with rules. The rules are only a few pages, but there’s lots of cases (6 classes of warship, about 8 technologies with various levels), but basically — you explore. You move. You fight. You research and buy. The advanced rules add lots of other stuff (mines and sweepers, fighters and carriers, cloaking and scanning, aliens and trade routes. The expansion adds … more, I guess. I intuited most of the rules correctly based on the components (although the details I had to refer to some player aids).

The rules are actually much simpler than Eclipse, because there are fewer subsystems. But you are dealing with fog of war. Massive fog of war. And logistics. (The infamous rule that buying a new technology does not confer it to older ships makes for an accounting headache, but gives you the feeling of a train rush in 18xx. Use your ships while you can!) Like all great games (if not necessarily true of all wars), attack has enough of an edge that things move forward.

My game, all told, took 3 hours, and I was shocked to discover that.

Would this be a great game with 4 players? Only after they’d all played, because you have to trust your opponents math and grasp of the rules. (I accidentally built a battle cruiser fleet before I had right shipbuilding tech. Not that it helped). And you’d have to set aside the time. I think this would make a stupendous PBEM game, particularly with a moderator that enforced the rules. I can see this game dragging with the wrong group, with most groups even, and I do worry that people will want to throw in all the chrome too early which makes decisions slower, adds randomness, but also gives you more things to be deliciously worried about.

A great war game is, to me, a fog of war game. And this has it. I don’t see it replacing Eclipse (which I haven’t played in a year and need to throw into the bag), but In My Opinion they share only theme. They don’t scratch the same itch.

Machi Koro Harbor Expansion

The Harbor Expansion adds a few new developments. Now you have to finish six; the (free) seventh gives you a coin whenever you are broke right before your turn to buy. And you take up the buildings and deal out some until you have 10 stacks, whenever you deplete a stack you deal out more until you have ten.

Thoughts after one play:

1. It is a touch longer, but setup and teardown is much easier, so that’s fine.
2. I think I’m going to play with a variant where you must start with at least N buildings that activate on a 1-6 and produce (not just steal) wealth. Our game had a slow start and almost had the third player not only go last, but have no incoming producing building available.
3. The Harbor is interesting (if you roll 10+, you may add two to the roll on your turn only). There are some buildings that are 11-13, 12-14, etc.
4. The promo gaming mega store is now officially a menace that I’m leaving out of my set.

I played 10 games of Machi Koro, I suspect this will get me to 15 more.

My Stage II reprint yearly appeal

I played Stage II again. It did not go over well, because the cards are even more brutal with the passing of a few more years.  (In fact, of the 15 themes we tried, exactly 3 people solved any of them, and one person solved exactly one). Since I love the game, but am too lazy to go about republishing it, some thoughts.

Have you considered that this would make a hell of an app? A single version could show the questions and answers (pass the phone around) and keep score, or if each player had the app you could buzz in? You could also download more themes, and have specialized games. (You couldn’t use the name, but the rules aren’t patentable).

I’m tempted to start making up more cards. This won’t help me (I can hardly play with my own cards) but if everyone starts making their own cards to read … well…). I suppose if I got a big enough group I could kickstart a printing of them and people could play.

Happy New Thread

The first open thread of 2015 ….

This blog has existed since Jan of 2005, according to wordpress (It was on a different site for a while). The original Tao of Gaming (non-blog) site was probably started 5-10 years before that. My tastes have changed mightily, although I have managed to become more sauve and debonair in real life, I’m still the same low-tech blogger online (although I no longer roll my own HTML….)

So, questions — What do people think of

• Space Empires 4x?
• Good Cop Bad Cop?
• Sultans of Karaya?

Media — I’ve been watching Cheers (up to Season 5), Black Mirror (very good). Doctor Who disappointed me with the fact that Clara is never leaving the show, but I’m resigned to it. I’m petering out on Supernatural at Season 8, but I actually watched a few episodes over the holidays. Most of my DVD queue is waiting for the recent batch of movies to be made available. I could use a new TV show or two. I did like True Detective.

Happy-ish New Year. It’s too cold for anything more definitive. (You know its cold when your Canadian friends send a note pointing out it is colder in South Texas than Canada).