boardgaming in photos

On 28 May 2010 I brought Automobile to Old Town Kopitiam Cheras, and played a 5-player game. Afif, Han and I have played before, Philip and Allen were new to the game. This was the first round, and there were already 10 distributors on the board. Han (yellow), Afif (red) and Allen (purple) produced mid-range (orange) cars, and there were only three slots in round 1 for selling mid-range cars via distributors. Needless to say they had to fire many distributors and take loss cubes. Thankfully I was the only one producing cheap cars, so my distributors kept their jobs.

Round 3 of 4. Distributors were highly utilised in this game. This was right after cars have been sold via distributors.

Close-up of the hardworking distributors.

I (playing green) never closed down any factory throughout the game, not even that cheap car factory (black border) in the foreground. I had a parts factory there, and thus was producing cars very very cheaply. I would lose $400 ($100 per factory) if I closed down my factories here. It was less expensive to take loss cubes due to running an old and out-of-date factory.

Since my (green) cheap car model was so out-of-fashion and unattractive, I had to do both advertising (white disc) and discounting (grey discs) to ensure I could sell them all.

Round 4. Look at how many cheap cars (black borders) were produced! Anti-clockwise from the top, Han (yellow), Philip (blue), Afif (red), Allen (purple) and I (green) all produced cheap cars.

I still love Automobile, especially when played with 5 players.

29 May 2010. Blue Moon. Han and I started a tournament a long time ago, vowing to play all 56 combinations of match-ups of the 8 Blue Moon races (including swapping sides). Till now we've only played 16 matches. Still a long way to go.

This time we played Khind (who are individually weak but fight in gangs) vs Flit (who are also generally weaker, but have good boosters and can usually return to hand to fight again). Highchirp (on the right) was the Most Valuable Player, because his special ability can really hurt the Khind by discarding members of a gang, reducing the strength of the gang. The Flit won in both the games that we played.

I think Blue Moon is an excellent game. This is a game that shines only after you get familiar with the decks. I had hoped to get my wife to like it, but she found it too confrontational. I still have three unplayed expansions.

This is from the cover of Dungeon Lords - a cute child imp patting a puppy-like slime monster. So you think Dungeon Lords is a cute game? You'd be completely wrong.

Han and I played Dungeon Lords again. My last play was half a year ago so I was a little rusty. The game was as brutal as I remembered. Maybe it was because I was rusty, I mostly struggled to survive, and was contented enough to not have a negative score at game end.

Dungeon Lords is quite a complex Eurogame, with a heavy dose of double guessing in the simultaneous action selection. There is a lot to think about. It is by no means a light game as the humour and artwork may suggest. Like Galaxy Trucker and Space Alert, it has a bit of a masochist streak - building something up and watching it get torn to pieces. Don't unleash this on innocent newbies. But it's a tense game for gamers. Our game felt a little slow. I think part of the reason is with only 2 players, you need to worry about playing the dummy players, which are needed to keep the game balanced.

We played events (optional for beginners). In the first year, and earthquake occurred, forcing me to lose two painstakingly built rooms. In the second year, the event forced us to move up the evilometer, which resulted in the Super Paladin paying Han a "friendly" visit. Owww...

I'm keen to play this again but with more players.