Thoughts of Chairman Mike

This weekend I hooked up with KC and Rita for a little gaming. I haven’t seen them for a while, so it was great to be able to spend some time with them again. In the bag, KC had a couple of games that I hadn’t played before, so they were my requests, and both KC and Rita were happy to get them to the table.

The first was Fresco, a fairly new release from Queen Games, one of my favorite publishers. Opening the box, you’re not disappointed, as there is the usual collection of high quality components: board, tiles, and a whole bunch of wooden pieces. Gameplay is fairly strait forward, and fits comfortably into the ‘Do a bunch of things, get a bunch of points’ (aka DABOT/GABOP in our group), with the theme of painting the ceiling of the cathedral. You use your workers to perform the paint purchase, mixing, and painting operations. They can also be used to get more cash, or be sent to the theater to improve their morale.

There are a couple of twists to the game. The first is that the choice of actions for your 5 workers is done at one time, and it’s hidden, all players revealing at the same time. The second is that player order each turn is chosen by the players by what time they want their workers to start that day. Start early in the day and you get to play earlier in the round, but you make your workers unhappy, and paint costs more in the market. Start later in the day and you play later in the round, but your workers become happier and paint costs less. Of course, playing early give you first choice of the paint tiles available in the market and tiles that can be painted in the cathedral. And having a happy workforce gains you an extra worker, an unhappy workforce loses you a worker. So there are a few things to balance.

Ordinarily I’m not a big fan of this type of hidden placement mechanism, but here it doesn’t annoy me too much, as it doesn’t have a huge impact. As you determine the paint available in the market, then pick turn order (the time mechanism thing), before you decide what your workers are gong to do you already can figure out what paint you’re likely to get from which market, so you rarely have to waste a worker, and there’s quite a few options on tiles to paint in the cathedral.

Fresco doesn’t really introduce anything new to the gaming world, but it’s easy to get into, has some decision points, and is fairly enjoyable. I’d call it inoffensive, in that it won’t upset anyone, but it won’t leave you clamoring for more. Which is perhaps damning with faint praise, but I don’t want to play a brain burning 18xx/Age of Steam game every time. However, it’s not one that I’d consider buying, but I’d be open to playing it if suggested. Unless I wanted my brain burning.

The second game was Macao, an Alea game. Another fairly recent game, but another not picked up by myself or others in the group. Definitely another DABOT/GABOP game, this time a goods delivery system thing, along with using cards as the roles/buildings/offices to give you bonuses or allow you to do stuff outside the general rules.

The twist to this game is the dice/cubes availability mechanism. There are 6 colors of cube, each with a matching die, and a 7-point wind rose that shows the 6 dice faces, and an arrow to show the current cube availability. Each turn the 6 dice are rolled, and you get to choose 2 of them. The color of the die dictates the color of cube (so pick the red die and you get red cubes, duh), and the number dictates the number of cubes and the number of turns ahead on the wind-rose you place them. So, pick the red-1, and you get a single red cube on the 1-point of the wind rose; pick the blue-6 and you get 6 blue cubes on the 6-point of the wind-rose. After everyone has picked, you all rotate your wind-rose by one ‘click’, so the cubes that were previously opposite the 1-point are now opposite the arrow, and those are the cubes that you get to use this turn. These cubes are then used to activate the cards that you have on your tableaux, which then become available to be ‘tapped’ each turn.

The cards available, which ones you choose, how you activate them to gain the combination benefits, and otherwise use cubes to gain control of spaces in the city, goods for delivery, and moving your ship to deliver the cubes, is a whole bunch of decision points. I’m not sure I like the game arc, as you keep adding goods to your ship while it’s out at sea, and you have this large goods delivery rush right at the end of the game.

However, I preferred Macao to Fresco, as the variation and interactions in the offices (which are all turned up at the start of the game, with 2 available per turn, so you can plan ahead to some extent), buildings and roles (with 4 turned over each turn, although not all are available with fewer than 4 players) made for more challenging decisions each turn. For those new to Euro style games I’d pick Fresco, as it has a gentler game arc and decision points.

And for the record, just to prove that Cooley’s First Law isn’t in operation here, I won Fresco, but lost out to KC by 3-4 points in Macao when we spotted that city locations were worth 2 Prestige Points (i.e. VPs), not 1PP as previously thought, enough to move him in front of me. Knowing that, I would have spent a little more effort in picking up city spaces.

Either way up, it was great to hang out with KC and Rita again, and catch up on family news. Thanks for making time for me, guys.

One of the games I bought for my iPad early on was Days of Wonder’s Small World, based on their board game of the same name (BGG entry). Whilst it looked pretty nice, I never got around to actually playing it because it was 2-player only, a point that Doug also mentioned in his blog post on iPad Euro games. However, DoW had promised that the next version would have an AI to allow solo play, so when I saw that there was an update available, I jumped on it to see. Sure enough, DoW were as good as their word, and there is now the option to play solo against an AI.

After three games I’m more than impressed with the game. The graphics are busy, but clear, the interface is very easy to understand and operate, and anyone who’s played the board game version should be able to jump right in and play. I’m not a good Small World player, but I comfortably won my first game, and I was concerned that the AI wasn’t particularly good. However, after getting spanked in my next two games that doesn’t appear to be a concern.  The game is very stable, with no crashes or hangs so far, and I haven’t identified a single issue with incorrect game play.

There are a few things that I’d like to see changed, but they’re all fairly minor. First is that when you are playing solo, it still has the AI’s turn showing as ‘upside down’ as if it were playing opposite you like a human player. It does make it hard to read the race/skill that has been selected. You can use the screen lock button for this, however. The other thing that I didn’t like is that there appears to be no way to quit a game in the middle and return to the menu.. Finally, I’d like some way to turn off the music in the game and listen to my own music, as the game music gets a bit wearing after a while.

However, none of those are enough to really detract from my enjoyment of Small World. A definite two thumbs up on this one – go download it from the iTunes App Store, and you’ll soon be as hooked on it as I am.