25 Oct 2020. Ticket To Ride: London. The COVID-19 situation in Malaysia turned bad recently and the Movement Control Order has been tightened. We try to stay home more. One upside is there are more opportunities to play boardgames with my family.
This is a short game and the luck of the draw is significant. It's a filler-length game, so the luck factor is not an issue. At least you feel like you've done what you can to improve your chances of winning. There are meaningful decisions to be made and you do have some control.
7 Wonders: Duel is a 2-player-only game. I played this with my wife Michelle. Although there are three ways to win, I suspect winning by victory points is the most common and also most practical. If you want to attempt the science victory, you need to work on it right from the start and you must not waver. It takes significant commitment. However, if your opponent knows you are shooting for it, he can stop you by spending some effort, but not a lot. Your efforts would come to naught. My feeling is the science victory is not a good deal. It's high-risk. The military victory is not much better. It too requires much effort and dedication, and it can be stopped without too much difficulty, as long as your opponent is paying attention. However going militaristic gets you some benefits even if you don't manage to capture your opponent's capital. You can force your opponent to lose money, and you earn points too. So it's a bit better than the science option. With the science approach, you have to collect many different science icons. This diverts you from earning Progress tokens (the big green circles), where you need to collect pairs of identical science icons. By attempting the science victory, you may have to sacrifice winning Progress tokens. Isn't that counter-intuitive?
These are cards from the second era (blue). In 7 Wonders: Duel, double turns are very important. Some wonders give you such powers. In this game you are always thinking a few steps ahead and calculating the back-and-forth card picks to see who is going to grab some highly desirable card. Being able to break the sequence can mean grabbing that crucial card you want.
These are cards from the third era (purple). The dark purple cards are the guilds. When flipped over they show the guild card type - purple. In the photo above there are two face-down guild cards and one face-up guild card - 5th row, rightmost card. Guild cards are usually worth many victory points. The VP value depends on the player tableaus.
One thing that helps keep the game fresh from one match to the next is the combination of wonders. There will be some variation from game to game because you will draw different wonders and you will end up picking different combinations. There is variety in the Progress tokens. There is also a slight variation in the cards. A few cards from each era are removed from play during game setup. Only a subset of guild cards are in play each game.
29 Oct 2020. I played Machi Koro with Michelle and younger daughter Chen Rui. We used the Harbour expansion. Machi Koro is a game that both my daughters and I enjoy a lot. Michelle has played Machi Koro Legacy with us before, but she had not yet tried the original. This was her first time.
This particular game was an epic fail for me. It was disastrous to the point of being comical. I bought many red cards, numbered 7 and 8. Red cards are attack cards. When an opponent rolls these numbers, you get to steal money from him. When rolling two dice, 7 is the most likely result. 8 has good odds too. The problem for me was, Chen Rui had this building below:
The Publisher is an offensive card too. If you own a Publisher and you roll a 7, you steal money from all other players who have retail buildings or F&B (food and beverage) buildings. The more such buildings they have, the more money you get to steal from them. My red buildings were all F&B buildings. I had many retail buildings too. Building powers are resolved in this order: red, blue and green, purple. Whenever Chen Rui rolled a 7, it was a death knell for me. Yes, I was going to steal some of her money using my red-7 Pizza Joints, but right after that she would take all that money back, and steal more of my money using her purple-7 Publisher. I had 15 retail and F&B buildings. One reason I had so many was Michelle's purple building, the Business Centre. You use the Business Centre to swap buildings with another player. When Michelle picked my buildings, she took the Forests and the Mines, blue buildings which generated income on any player's turn, which fitted into her Furniture Factory strategy. When she gave me buildings, she gave me the outdated Bakeries which were retail buildings. Gosh, I was hammered from both left and right.
In the early game I bought many convenience stores. They generate $3 each whenever you roll a 4. They are normally a good early investment because most early buildings only give $1. Unfortunately I kept rolling everything except 4's. I was so frustrated that my 7-Eleven's were not making me any money that I insisted on rolling one die until they started doing so. In Machi Koro, generally you want to upgrade to rolling two dice if you want to make money more efficiently. I stayed at one die due to being stubborn. My chain of 7-Eleven's not only did not help me generate income, they cost me a lot of money every time Chen Rui rolled a 7. Eventually I did roll a 4 (photo above). It only happened once in the whole game. By then it was already near game end. Well, at least I could die in peace now.
Michelle should have won this particular game. She had built the airport, but had forgotten to use its power. The airport's power is if you forgo buying a building, you earn $10. She had certainly forgotten to claim this $10 reward more than a few times. By the time she realised it, Chen Rui had caught up to her. Eventually Chen Rui won, and she was delighted. Normally she doesn't expect to win at boardgames because she is the youngest in the family.
A few days later we played again, this time using the other expansion Millionaire's Row. I wanted to let Michelle try different buildings. This time Chen Rui bought the Tech Start-Up early in the game. She had once used this building to soundly defeat older daughter Shee Yun and I. However this time she got confused about the mechanism and didn't use the building properly. She thought that she had to roll a 10 to be able to place $1 on the building. She could actually do it every turn regardless of die roll. By the time she rolled a 10, she could already steal money from everyone, amounting to whatever the total was on the building at that time. For a long time she didn't place any money, and she was in no hurry to upgrade to rolling two dice. She bought the Tech Start-Up very early in the game and it could have been a killer strategy. What a pity.
28 Oct 2020. On a whim, I launched Twilight Struggle on the iPad. Playing it again reminded me of how much I admire Playdek's handiwork. Such good user interface design. The background music was highly evocative too. I only played against the AI, which was not particularly challenging. I was a little rusty, but I managed to win without too much difficulty.
I played the USA, so the early game was slightly tough. This screenshot above was taken in Turn 2 (out of 9 Turns in the whole game). Towards the end of the Cold War, the situation became more advantageous to the USA.
This was taken in Turn 9, the final Turn. The USA score was at 18, which meant I was 2VP away from an instant victory. Throughout the game I had been steadily securing my influence around the world. At this point I had the advantage in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe. USSR had the advantage in Central America. We were roughly equal in South America. I established dominance in Asia and the Middle East relatively early in the game. Europe was a stalemate for most of the game. I only managed to gain an advantage in the late game.
This was the scoring card that won me the game - Middle East Scoring. This gave me 5VP, pushing me past the 20VP threshold, thus giving me an instant win.
30 Oct 2020. I felt bored stuck at home due to the Movement Control Order, so I dug up old games on the iPad to play. Splendor can be played in a casual manner to pass the time without taxing the brain too much. It suited my needs. This app is quite well done. It is certainly pretty.
The AI's are not that strong though. I must admit my benchmark for whether an AI is strong is whether I can defeat it. If I can beat it, it's weak, because I'm not that good at these games I have been playing. I am rusty. Even for Splendor I had forgotten some of the rules and I worked them out as I played. I didn't mind the mediocre AI's, since I wasn't looking for intense competition. I just wanted to pass the time doing something moderately challenging and not completely brainless.
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