My copy of Ra was the original German version published by Alea. It was a surprise gift from my Taiwanese friends. They had bought it from the German eBay, back in 2004, when it was an out-of-print game. Recently my elder daughter Shee Yun (3.5 years old) has been requesting to play with it. I have some player aids / mats where you can place your tiles. She likes matching the tiles to the pictures on the player aids. One night she whispered secretively in my ear, "Waaa" (哗), and I wondered what made her say "Wow". Only when she pointed outside (my boardgame shelf is just outside my bedroom) I realised she was actually saying "Raaa" in a "My Presscioussss" way.
And while playing the tile matching game with her using Ra, I realised something for the first time after having owned this game for 4 years. I actually have a lot of extra tiles in the box! It had never occurred to me to count the tiles. So I have played quite a number of games of Ra where the tile draws have been skewed by the incorrect mix of tiles. So now I have an excuse for losing so frequently.
The game did come with many tiles that were not printed correctly. The position of the picture is off, the worst case being the picture for the next tile being visible too at the edge. However the game is still playable with these misprints, because you can still tell what tile it is. I suspect the original owner had requested for replacement tiles from the publisher, and when he/she sold the game on eBay, he/she had put all tiles into the box.
Ahahah, funniest story ever... "wwaaaa!"
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, doesn't it grate on you that your win/loss in this game is completely invalidated by the incorrect tile mix? omg, I would've flipped.
heh heh, i actually lose quite often, so now i can use this as an excuse for having lost all those previous games.
ReplyDeletebut come to think of it, the impact of those extra tiles is probably not too bad, because the mix of those extra tiles is roughly balanced. there are extras of all types of tiles, Ra's, monuments, gods, rivers, floods, disasters etc. but then of course 2 additional earthquake tiles is 100% extra, compared to 1 additional sphinx tile being 20% extra.
i should go tell my taiwan kaki's about this. they'd have a good laugh. i played Ra with them a lot.