Lifeboats: Plank of Carneades

Lifeboats is a 1993 game. That's more than 30 years old! I am pretty sure I have heard about it before. The version I recently played is a 2024 remake. This is a negotiation game for up to 7 players. This is the kind of game which I would cheekily say can destroy friendships, and I wouldn't be lying. Be prepared for hurt feelings. 

There is a disaster at sea. The ship is sinking, and everyone scrambles onto a lifeboat. You have a group of sailors and you want to get as many of them saved as possible. They don't need to be on the same lifeboat. In fact it's best to diversify. Now these lifeboats have not be well maintained. They are leaky and some might not make it to the nearby islands. 

You have two types of sailors - captains and just regular pirates. For any voting you need to do during the game, captains get 2 votes and pirates only 1. Also when they survive, captains are worth more points. Everyone has the same set of cards. They include cards in every player colour, which is both sailor colour and boat colour. You also have three captain cards (those on the right). 

Here's what happens during a round of play. Some boats will start leaking, or leak more. One boat will move forward one or two steps. Then players can choose to have one of their sailors switch to another boat. Most of this is done using a voting mechanism. Which boat will leak? Everyone votes. If you want the green boat to leak, play your green card face down. You can negotiate. You can lie. You can try to cut deals. When everyone is ready, reveal all the cards. The boat getting the most votes leaks. A leaking boat still moves, but if there are more leaks than sailors, the boat sinks and all the sailors are lost. A leak takes up space. If there is not enough space, the people on the boat vote on who to throw overboard. In this situation, only the players who have sailors on the boat get to vote. This is when having a captain is powerful. The captain has 2 votes. It's not a good idea to totally dominate a boat though. In the leaking stage, your opponents can easily agree to vote to give you the leak, because no one else has a stake in that boat. 

Voting to give the leak is voting who to hurt. Thus hurt feelings. The next important vote is which boat to move. The boats are only 3 steps away from safety. Leaking boats move 2 steps. That means a boat can reach safety in as few as 2 rounds. When voting for boat movement, often the vote will be for an outcome which is the most equal. No one wants to help the leading players more. Everyone prefers to help the trailing players. 

One very important aspect of the game is the three captain cards you start the game with. Instead of voting with a colour card, you can vote with a captain card. If you are the only player who has played a captain card, you get to decide the outcome. You can overrule the vote. This is very powerful. You might send a boat with your people to safety. You might save a boat with your people which everyone else is trying to sink. Captain cards are single-use. Once you play it, it is removed from the game, unlike the regular colour cards which return to your hand. That means you only have three chances to overrule a vote in the whole game. Think carefully when you want to use a captain card. 

If two or more players play a captain card, no one gets to overrule. You play with the regular rules. However if everyone plays a captain card, the start player of the round makes the decision. As you can see, playing a captain card is a very important decision and it can have a huge impact to how the game turns out. The start player role is an important consideration as well. In the case of ties, the start player decides. 

You are going to do a lot of voting in this game. This is the kind of game that triggers lots of discussions. You try to convince others to help you, or to attack someone else. You try to collaborate sometimes. Sometimes you betray your friends. You say you will vote for his boat, but you play a captain card to move your own boat. 

You can doom a boat by jumping to another boat. If a boat has three sailors and three leaks, and one of the sailors go to another boat, and no other sailor joins this boat, the two remaining sailors will be overwhelmed by the leaking, and the boat will sink. 

This is a perfect information game. Everyone knows exactly the board situation. The uncertainty comes from not knowing how your opponents are voting. The game is actually pretty simple. There is some risk that a game can drag. If people want to keep negotiating and can't decide, things can slow to a halt. But you don't want to play this game without negotiations. That would be missing the point. This game is more about gaming the people than solving a logic problem. It is also a lot about trying to read others' intentions. Will anyone play a captain card? Will they vote with the colour they said they would? There will be leader bashing, because everyone can tell who is leading. 

I find the game clever and clean. Negotiation games are a special niche. They offer an experience which is different from most games. Just remember to play it with the right mindset. Don't take attacks too personally. It can feel so, even more than confrontational wargames. In wargames, it is expected that you want to hurt your opponent. In Lifeboats, you are choosing who to hurt. You have options, and when you choose a specific person or persons, that attack feels more personal. There is a certain helplessness when you play this game. Whether you succeed depends a lot of other people's actions. The captain cards are an important tool to help you in critical situations. I find that with gamers, we do a lot of analysis during play, to see who is leading and by how much. We are rational and we argue logically how we should vote, so that no one gets too far ahead and everyone does more or less equally well. This can make things a little boring and work-like. How much fun this game is depends a lot on what your group is like. 

Sidereal Confluence

Plays: 6Px1.

The Game

Sidereal Confluence is a complex negotiation game with a sci-fi setting. You are all alien races which have just met one another. You are colonising new planets, developing new technologies. Having met one another, you are now able to trade, and also learn from one another. This game is not about wars and aggressions. It is about interstellar cooperation and shared prosperity. You compete to contribute most to these, and your success is measured by victory points. VP's come from various actions, the most important of which is developing new technologies and sharing them with your friends.

The game is played over 6 rounds. Every interstellar civilisation starts with some planets, some resources and some technologies. Every alien race is very different. There are nine races to choose from, and they play very differently. This is one of the game's strengths. There is a big incentive to trade, because you don't produce enough of what you want, and you produce stuff you don't want which others do. You do get to develop your production and cube conversion abilities, but they likely won't be enough to meet your needs even by game end. Big research projects require a lot of resources of the same type. You need to trade a lot, and hope by cutting good deals you ultimately position yourself to be greatest contributor to intergalactic cooperation.

This is a technology card. Most technologies are conversion powers, converting resources on the left side of the arrow to those on the right side. Input and output. The tiny 5-17 means you are converting resources of roughly 5 value points to resources of 17 value points. The value point system is just a rough guide for players, based on the rarity of resources. The various resources will have different values to different players, under different situations.

This is one of the race cards. It's huge, about A4 size. It describes the race's unique abilities, and even comes with strategy tips. Before a game starts, it is best that everyone gives a short introduction of his race. The race I played was a plant based race. Planets I colonised produced double the resources, but to colonise I needed to spend double the spaceships normally needed.

Top left: Start card of a race, specifying starting resources, techs and planets. Bottom left: Reference card outlining the 3 phases of a round. The right half of the card is a donation area. Sometimes you produce goods which must be given away and cannot be used by yourself. You either trade them away, or if you fail to do so, you donate them. Top right: This is your personal deck of tech cards. Some are start techs. The rest can be developed, or learned from other races. Mostly the latter.

My four start techs. Techs are double-sided, a basic side and an advanced side. These are all on the basic side. At the bottom of each card you can see two ways to flip it to the advanced side. For my particular race, option 1 is to destroy a jungle planet and some resources, turning them into one victory point and another resource. Option 2 (which is the more common way) is to sacrifice another specific tech card. Flipping to the advanced side always gives you a better conversion power, but you need to consider whether the cost is justified.

The common area looks like this. The setup depends on the number of players. The top row consists of planets, and the bottom row the research teams. Every round you bid for these using spaceships, essentially just another currency. When you win (i.e. colonise) a planet, it produces resources for you every round. When you win (i.e. employ) a research team, you earn the exclusive right to develop a new technology. You don't immediately develop the new tech. You still need to give the research team the resources they require before you get the new tech and score.

One important concept in the bidding mechanism is the minimum bid. Each item has a minimum bid, and some are higher than others. If you bid low, there is a risk that the higher bidders (who get to pick earlier) claim items with low minimum bids, leaving behind only items with high minimum bids which you don't qualify for. You not only have to consider bidding high enough so that you get to pick what you really like, you also have to bid high enough so that you reduce the risk of leaving empty handed.

That's my planet on the left. It has a x2 marker, which is unique for my race. This planet produces double the resources.

A round consists of three phases. The first is the trading phase, where everyone engages in trading simultaneously. It is a free-for-all. You can trade resources, spaceships, planets, even promises. Promises are binding in this game. Some special actions are allowed in the trading phase, e.g. upgrading techs, upgrading planets, developing techs. When you do these, the upgraded versions become available to you in the current round, starting from the next phase, which is the economy phase. The economy phase is all about production and conversion. You produce resources to be used in future rounds. The third phase is the confluence phase, in which everyone learns new techs developed by any race in Phase 1. This is also when you bid for planets and research teams. The round structure is pretty straightforward, but execution can be time-consuming because there is a lot to digest, many deals to consider, pros and cons to weigh, and upgrades to plan. Haggling can take time, sometimes going back and forth between potential trade partners, trying to iron out a deal.

The Play

Most victory points come from developing techs. There are two parts to this. You get VP for discovering the tech itself. Simple techs in the early game are worth little, but complex ones later on can be worth a lot. The other part is the VP for sharing a tech. This depends on which round you develop the tech in. The sharing VP is high in the earlier rounds, because it is not easy to have developed techs so early. When you plan your research, you should consider both types of VP's.

Developing techs require a lot of resources, so you must develop your little empire. The hunger for resources keeps increasing and your empire must keep up. You have to decide which planets and techs to upgrade, and which techs you can afford to sacrifice. You will likely have to decide some resource types to specialise in, i.e. to be able to produce or manufacture a large amount of. You try to be self sufficient, producing the raw materials for your factories which will eventually manufacture the end products you want.

The research teams come up mostly randomly. They need different types of resources. You need to adapt to the situation. You must watch what your opponents are specialising in, whether they already have research teams they are committed to, whether they will compete with you for specific resources, planets or new research teams.

Increasing your production and manufacturing capacity, supplementing and supporting them through trading, and eventually completing massive research projects - these are the core of the game.

My race was a vegetable race, and colonisation was particularly challenging. The race card had explicitly advised that I needed to trade for spaceships early to stay in the colonisation race, but somehow I managed to fail doing so. I never had many planets. One unique ability I had was to destroy jungle planets to advance my starting techs. I traded with Allen for jungle planets. He could colonise them easily from a private deck of planets. That was his unique ability. Advancing my starting techs was nice. I earned 1VP each time I did it. However later on I wasn't sure whether it was worthwhile. I had destroyed planets for it, and 1VP seemed measly compared to VP from developing techs. I decided to switch my focus to research projects.

Tim played an unusual race, a nasty one, essentially a blackmailing syndicate. It could spend resources to steal resources from another race. Such powers were best used as threats, to convince others to cut him better deals, sometimes downright extorting them. Whoever had traded with him was immune from his stealing powers for the round, so trading with him was akin to paying a protection fee. His was a scary power. If everyone gave in to him, he would grow very powerful. So I tried to convince everyone that we should not give in to terrorism. It was easier said than done. Sometimes I too gave in, especially when I was just a small step away from completing a major project, and didn't want to risk it being delayed another round.

Another one of Tim's abilities was a poisoned gift. He could produce a set of goods, which must be given away together with a spy. Once he had planted enough spies in an empire, his stealing actions would become more damaging. This meant he had to focus on just a few empires to send spies to, so that he could sufficiently build up. Allen was the main victim of this. However he happily accepted the goods up front, spending them on his infrastructure. Ironically these resources helped Allen greatly towards self sufficiency. He built a strong production engine, and became the eventual winner. He turned to be more beneficiary than victim.

Of my four start techs, I had upgraded two of them, bottom left and top right. The advanced sides no longer showed the upgrade criteria. The tech at the top right had no resources to the left of the arrow, which meant it was a pure production tech needing no input. It was like a planet.

The game takes up a lot of space. The common area does not take up much, but each player needs much space. Every time someone researches a new tech, everyone else will benefit from it and will need to play that tech card into his area. This table we played at was not big enough. Sinbad had to place some of his cards on the low table on the left. We put some common game components there too.

During the trade phase, I prepared for the economy phase by placing resources I needed onto the tech cards where I would be using them as input. This helped me reserve resources I needed for myself. Also I could easily see which techs did not have the required raw materials yet, which I might want to trade for. The conversions (or manufacturing) during the economy phase are simultaneous. You cannot take the output from one tech card and feed it as input to another tech card. Outputs can only be used as input in the next round. So you don't get to chain your tech cards like a factory line.

This is a research team. Their name is at the top, the tech they are working on is at the bottom. This particular team needs either 18 green resources or 18 white resources. The conversion in the white box is what the new tech does.

This is one of my start techs. It has a star icon at the top left.

The Thoughts

Sidereal Confluence is a trading and negotiation game, but it is also more than that. The trading is a basic building block, a means to an end. The end is, of course, victory points. To get there, you need to work on profitable research projects. To complete many research projects, you need resources. To have many resources you need to keep developing your empire. So to me this is also very much a development game, just that trading is one of your basic tools when developing your empire and completing your research projects.

There is a lot of cube conversion. I never really got into calling the coloured cubes what they were meant to be. I just called them small green cubes, or big yellow cubes, and so on. This sounds bad because it means the theme doesn't come through, but after a while it doesn't really matter. The game is enjoyable even if I call the cubes just cubes.

It is a complex game. With 6 of us, it took about 3 hours. I'm not sure whether we were just slow. I think the game needs at least 5 or 6 to be fun. With more players, there will be more possibilities. There will be more options in the common area too - the planets and the research teams.

Panic on Wall Street

Plays: 7Px1.

The Game

Panic on Wall Street is themed around stock market trading, in the non-computerised age, when buyers and sellers shout and haggle and behave no differently from a fishmonger at a wet market. Despite the theme, some of the mechanisms actually do not work the same way as their real-life equivalents. So you need to make sure you explain the concepts carefully so that players don't get confused by their own preconceptions.

Players are split into two groups - fund managers and investors. They compete separately within these two groups, and at the end of the game there are two winners, one richest player from each group. The most prominent part of the game is the trading. This is a real-time phase, timed by a 2-minute hourglass, where all managers and investors try to sell / buy shares. It is an open-for-all format. Strictly speaking, the managers are not selling the shares to the investors. They are merely selling the rights to earn dividends from those shares for one round. When an investor buys a share, he needs to consider how much dividend it might bring and how much he is willing to pay. A share can actually "pay" negative dividend, i.e. the poor guy who bought it will lose more money! When a manager sells a share under his control, he will of course try to sell it for as high a price as possible. There is a $10 per share commission that he must pay to the bank every round. That is his operating cost. For every share that he can't sell, it's a $10 loss. There is time pressure for both investors and managers. Investors want to grab every opportunity to make money, and managers want to make sure they don't end up with unsold shares.

The large cards are the shares. You can write prices on them with a dry-erase marker that comes with the game. The round markers are investor markers, indicating that the shares have been sold. Each investor has his own colour. All three shares here have been bought by the same investor player.

Once the trading phase ends, it is time to determine the dividend amounts. This is determined by die rolls. The die faces don't specify the exact dividend amounts, they just indicate how many notches the values go up or down on the game board. There are four types of shares, ranging from low to high risk and volatility. The higher the volatility, the more extreme the possible values for dividends. The more volatile share types (red and yellow) can "pay" negative dividends, but when the dividend amounts go up, you can really make a killing. Once the new dividend amounts are determined, investors collect dividends, then pay the managers, and then the managers pay the $10 share commissions to the bank.

Movement of dividend payout level is determined by these colourful dice. Red is the most volatile. It can go up 7 levels! That means it can go from one end of the scale to the other.

Before the next round starts, some new shares will be introduced, and the managers will buy them via an auction. As new shares are injected into the game, there will be more opportunities for both managers and investors to make money. They will also be able to diversify more if they choose to do so. The game ends after a fixed number of rounds, and the richest players (among managers and among investors) win.

The Play

I did a 7-player game, 3 managers and 4 investors, and I was one of the managers. The trading was quite a riot. It was a messy, noisy and chaotic free-for-all. As a manager, I always felt the pressure of time running out and not being able to sell all my shares. Every unsold share is a $10 loss. That said, I tended to set prices higher, trying not to cut my own margins too slim. There was a lot of haggling. At one point I even offered packaged deals - three shares for $50!

I sold those three shares on the right as a packaged deal to Allen, three for $50.

The trading phase may be the most prominent, but the game is certainly not only about that. It is an exciting and engaging execution phase, but outside of that phase you do need to plan your strategy beforehand, e.g. what shares to buy as an investor, and how to price your shares as a manager. Things may not always work out when the clock starts ticking, so you have to be flexible and be able to think fast. Sometimes you need to be adamant, but sometimes you have to react to how others are playing. I find that managers bidding for the new shares is quite an important aspect of the game. This is a long-term, strategic aspect of the game, allowing managers fine-tune their portfolios.

Red shares have hit rock bottom, while green shares are doing well.

All these standing up are the investors. Look at them all so absorbed. But in the end it was the cool cat sitting down (Ivan in black) who beat all of them to win. He observed that the green shares kept going up so he invested heavily in them.

The buying of shares, to me, is more or less just gambling. The investors can decide how much risk to take, whether to diversify. They know the current dividend level, and how volatile each share type is, i.e. how much the dividend level may go up or drop down to, but whether it will go up or down or not move at all is purely determined by a die and not by player actions.

The Thoughts

Panic on Wall Street will be remembered for its noisy and chaotic trading phase. I feel this is the central idea and the rest of the game is built to support it and to give it context. It certainly is exciting, and it works. Two things make me a little uncomfortable about the game, although I would hesitate to call them problems. Firstly, the fact that players need to compete in separate manager and investor groups. It would be nice to have them all compete together, as opposed to having this disjointed economic system. As a manager, I don't really care how well or how badly the investors do. It would be nice to have an integrated economic system, which would create more conflict between investor and managers. Separated competition means a 6-player game feels like two 3-player games.

The second thing that makes me uncomfortable is the lack of control over dividend levels. They are not driven by market forces or supply and demand. This is more a problem with my expectations than a problem with the game. The game tells the players probabilities and risks and rewards, and lets them make decisions based on these alone. The eventual dividend levels are modeled as something beyond the players' control.

All that said, I think this game is best played as a light party game with a big group, and the two concerns that I have will become non-issues when you are playing with a rowdy bunch of friends. The game becomes one of brinkmanship and of striking deals under time pressure. How much are you willing to pay for an opportunity? How much risk are you willing to take? In the end it is not about how much you transact. It is about how much you earn from the transactions. That's something to keep in mind throughout the game.

Pacific Typhoon

Plays: 5Px1.

The Game

Pacific Typhoon is a card game using the Pacific War during World War II as the setting. The players do not belong to the Japanese side or the Allied side, and instead every round they can pick which side they want to be on. At the start of a round the start player (which rotates) reveals two battle cards and chooses one to be fought over. Then every player has one chance to play force cards to participate in the battle on one side or the other. Force cards contribute strength, and the side with the higher strength total wins the battle. The battle card itself and the force cards of the losing side become the spoils of war. They are distributed among the players of the winning side by the player who contributed the most strength. What's interesting is this player is only required to distribute the number of cards as evenly as possible, regardless of the point value of the cards. E.g. if I have five spoils cards of values 5, 4, 2, 1, 1 that I need to split among 3 players, I'd probably give myself 5+4, and give the others 2 and 1+1.

The game can involve much negotiation, cooperation, bluffing and even betrayal. Players can persuade one another to work together to be on the winning side. They can gang up on the leader. Since noone is tied to being on the Japanese or the Allied side, it's pretty much every man for himself, and alliances will likely be shifting all the time.

The above is the high-level overview. Going into details, there are rules around card characteristics and restrictions on playing cards. When the start player of a round picks a battle card, he decides whether to fight a day or night battle, whether to fight an air, surface, submarine or combined battle. These restrict the force cards that can be played that round. Every battle card has a year of battle, which also restricts the force cards that can be played. Normally each player can only play one force card, but there are some special force cards - bonus cards and event cards - which are not limited. They have various special abilities. Some basic force cards also have special abilities, e.g. being able to immediately destroy another force card, or getting double strength when fighting a particular battle. All these details are based on historical events, so the game does have many historical details.

The game ends when the battle card deck runs out. The player with the most points on the spoils cards captured wins.

There are many variants that come with the game, e.g. a variant where players belong to one specific side of the war, and one where battles are resolved following the historical timeline. I have not tried these variants.

The Play

I did a 5-player game, since this game seems to be best with 5 or 6. Han, Allen, Wan, Shan and I played. I found that the start player's choice of battle can give himself much advantage, especially when the restriction is high and he has just the right card to play, or when he has a very powerful card or card combination that meets the battle type he declares. However, there is also a disadvantage because playing your force card(s) first means you are already committed and others can decide how they want to play based on the force cards already committed on the table. This means that the last player of the round has the biggest advantage in terms of having information available to him, and can often decide the outcome of the battle.

From the early game I jumped into a big lead, and somehow despite the others working together to stop me, I continued to lead. My early victories let me increase my hand size, so I had more flexibility. I also drew good cards, and I was lucky with my die rolls. Some cards require die rolls, but not many. I was quite amazed at my lucky streak. I thought I'd have to bribe and cajole to get some of my opponents to help me or at least victimise me less, however my cards were so good that a few big wins put me even further in the lead.

We didn't manage to finish the game. We played about half the battle deck. It was enough to understand the game. Initially the restrictions and symbols took a while to internalise.

Game in progress. In each round there will be a battle card in the centre, and each player can play a card(s) to fight for it. So far three players have sided the Japanese (red) and only one the Allied (blue). The fifth player has played a white event card and has not yet committed to any side.

The spoils of war that I have won. The top three are battle cards which are kept face up. Force cards won and kept face down in a stack. The numbers in the yellow circles are the victory points. The full green card and half green card icons are resource icons, which increases your hand size. I have a full resource and two half resources, which means my hand size is increased by two.

The Thoughts

Despite the many details and restrictions surrounding the card play, all of which are relevant to the Pacific War theme, the game didn't feel like refighting the war at all. It is a numbers game, trying to squeeze out as much strength as you can from your cards and thus winning spoils which are worth victory points. I think this is the first time I see so much historical flavour in a game (the photos, the specific rules, the ships and planes represented, the events represented) and yet the feeling of the gameplay is nothing like the setting. I get a strong feeling of "pasted-on theme", but I don't believe this is a mechanism-before-theme game. Too many individual rules are directly related to the theme.

I see Pacific Typhoon as a card game good for 4 to 6 players who like some negotiation, some bluffing, and shifting alliances. In fact, for each battle there is probably more competition among the players on the winning side trying to be the top contributor. In each round it can feel like there is one winning player as opposed to one winning side with multiple players, unless the players on the winning side negotiate and agree on the spoils distribution beforehand. The historical elements are a nice touch and is quite educational, just don't expect to feel like you're fighting a war much. You'll feel more like some diety nudging the battle outcomes one way or the other.

Game mechanism-wise I don't find the game outstanding, but if you enjoy the Pacific War theme, you will like the rich details here.

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Buy from Noble Knight Games. Status: in stock (at time of this post).

Genoa

I played this with Wan, who has written about it at this blog post. Since he has done the hard work of describing the game, I can save a lot of work and just make my description brief. :-)

The Game

Genoa, formerly called Traders of Genoa, is at its core a negotiation game. Your aim is to earn the most money, and there are many ways to do so in the game. On your turn, you can create up to five possible actions, however usually you can only make use of one of them. The others you try to sell to other players, thus making more money for yourself, while likely also helping the other players. At game end, the richest player wins.

The game board is made up of building spaces and street spaces. Every building provides a benefit, e.g. collecting goods, cards, control markers or special action tiles. On your turn, you roll two dice to determine a start building. You place a stack of five action discs on it. After that you may move the stack to an adjacent building or street, leaving behind one disc. You may do so until you exhaust the stack. During the stack movement, since you can only use one of the action discs, you will try to sell your surplus action discs to others. This is where the negotiation comes in. You try to strike a mutually beneficial deal. Sometimes you may choose not to use up the stack of action discs, to deny your opponents actions, but of course that also means you lose out on making money.

Top view of the game board. Round track on the left. The outermost rows of buildings on left and right are just storage spaces and are not part of the play area. The buildings in the play area each has a name and an icon indicating the benefit it gives.

The stack of action disks. It had started at the villa on the right, and had now moved one step to the Spices building. It could now move to the Restaurant, or to one of the street spaces.

Everyone starts with four cards, each representing one of the four key card-based ways of earning money in the game, and $130.

There are various ways of making money in the game. Large orders require you to deliver 3 different goods to specific buildings. Small orders require you to deliver single goods to specific buildings. Privilege cards are worth money at game end. They each represent a building on the board, and if you have privilege cards of adjacent buildings, the values increase. Messages require action discs on the same player's turn (not necessarily your own) to connect two specific buildings. All these four are represented by cards. A fifth way is controlling buildings. To do this you need to have collected control markers, and then use an action disc on a street space to place the control markers on adjacent buildings. Whenever anyone else performs an action at your building, you earn $10 from the bank. At game end, you also earn $10 per controlled building.

And of course, you also earn money from selling off actions during your turn.

The game lasts a specific number of rounds depending on the number of players. However sometimes depending on the die rolls one or more rounds may be skipped. This creates some uncertainty.

The Play

We had a 5-player game - Chong Sean, Wan, Shan, Chee Wee and I - and I think this is the best configuration. At first we were rather slow in striking deals, because we weren't very familiar with the system and with how to value the various actions available. Thankfully the negotiations speeded up considerably afterwards, else the game would really have dragged. Some of us focused more on certain strategies. Chong Sean did many big orders, Chee Wee did many messages, I collected many privilege cards. I also tried to gain control of more buildings. Shan also worked on controlling buildings, and Chong Sean too.

My cards in the early game. A privilege card (brown) shows which building it represents, and lists the total value of a set of cards depending on how many adjacent buildings the set has. A message card (green) shows two buildings that need to be linked by action disks for the message to be delivered. A large order card (pink) shows 3 goods and the delivery destination. A small order card (blue) shows 1 good and the delivery destination.

Chong Sean and I, being the ones who have played more games than the others, are always perceived as doing better, so we were at a disadvantage in this game. We were always perceived as bigger threats, so often when one of us made an offer, another player could offer the same, and the tendency would be make the deal with that player, even though the offer was exactly the same. Chong Sean after having completed a few big orders, and me having started collecting more privilege cards, were quickly thought to be in the lead by far. Not good. Chong Sean pleaded that he had been paying a lot to buy those goods required to complete his big orders, so his net income was not a lot at all. It was true, but at the time I don't think anyone really believed him, or cared. Chee Wee kept a low profile, but he had actually earned a lot of money from delivering messages. It was also hard for me to convince others that I wasn't really doing that well, because the number of privilege cards were open for all to see, unlike the money that Chong Sean had earned from big orders (money is always secret). I kept telling them I didn't have a lot of cash and I had so few orders done. Of course Chong Sean kept telling them that the privilege cards were worth a lot.

I had started collecting more and more privilege cards.

One thing that we missed out during rules explanation was the control of buildings. Chong Sean had explained that building owners earned $10 when the buildings were used by others, but forgot to tell us until halfway through the game that ownership was also worth $10 at game end. He had been distracted by a question during rules explanation. I guess I had gained a slightly unfair advantage due to this, because I was the one who had spent the most effort in controlling buildings. I did earn quite a fair bit of money when my buildings were used. I kept trying to convince everyone that it was just spare change. I don't think anyone believed me though.

Towards game end, I had collected 9 of the 14 privilege cards. Wan had 4, and Chee Wee 1. In the final round, I decided to attempt a big deal with Wan. I asked for his 4 privilege cards for $240. By giving me his 4 cards I would earn a lot of extra money, and I was prepared to split the profit with him, giving him a bigger cut. My gut feel was I needed to do this mutually beneficial deal to give me a surer win over the other players, but at the same time I had to make sure I don't give Wan a cut so big that I'd let him overtake me. So it was a bit of a gamble on what the right cut was. We negotiated, and eventually settled on $240. He gained $140 nett, I gained $70 nett. We did quite a fair bit of maths to work this out.

By now I had nine privilege cards.

Later in the game. I (green) controlled five buildings, Shan (red) two, Chong Sean (yellow) two.

The space at the centre is the marketplace. If the die roll determines that the action disk stack will start at the marketplace, the round marker will advance by one, shortening the game by one round.

Then the game ended, and we counted our money. Wan and I were both the richest, at $850! Tiebreaker was leftover resources, and I won by 1 more resource than him. That was very very close. We checked. I actually would have won without making that trade with him, so I had actually taken an unnecessary risk. I almost offered him $250, which would have cost me the game. Effectively that deal brought Wan from 3rd to 2nd place. Chee Wee who had been quietly making a lot of money was in 3rd place.

This was what I had at game end.

After the game, we realised a mistake that we had made. The goods buildings gave two goods and not one. I guess that would have made completing big and small orders more lucrative.

As I wrote this blog post, a few weeks after our game, I spotted an error in the scoring. Wan was the actual winner, and I was in second place. I wasn't the leading player at all. The final scores were: Wan 850, me 750, Chee Wee 735, Shan 620, Chong Sean 575. If Wan and I had not made that big trade, the final scores would have been: Chee Wee 735, Wan 710, me 680, Shan 620, Chong Sean 575. So, it was correct for me to have closed the deal. It brought me from 3rd to 2nd place. It was good for Wan too, because it won him the game!

The Thoughts

Close-up of the game board.

I enjoyed Genoa. Being a negotiation game, whether the game is fun depends on the people you play with. If not played briskly enough I think the game can be a pain. And of course the game can suffer from perceived notions of the players. The game is most fun with creative and flamboyant people. From turn to turn, the game system presents different opportunities, and it is up to you to make the most of what you get, picking one action for yourself, and trying to earn more money by selling off other actions, while minimizing the help they give to your opponents. On your opponents' turns, you are very much involved too because you'd be trying to sway their decisions and trying to make use of their actions too. It's a very involved game with little downtime. You are always engaged in negotiations.

Die Handler

I have heard of Die Handler (The Trader?) before, known to be a good Eurogame that was never published in English and never republished after going out of print, but never tried to find out what it was about. At the Wesak Day game session at Old Town Kopitiam Cheras on Fri 28 May 2010, Jeff brought it, and taught Afif, Han and I to play.

Note: Some photos are courtesy boardgamecafe.net.

The Game

In this game the players are traders trying to make money by delivering goods from one city to another. The money earned is then used to increase your social standing. The catch is once you've achieved a certain status, you will need to pay an upkeep cost every round, depending on how high you are on the chart. We joked that it's not cheap being a Datuk. You need to maintain a good income. At the end of the game the highest ranked player wins, tie breaker being cash on hand.

Some background: Tun, Tan Sri and Datuk are Malaysian honourary titles awarded to people who have made significant contributions to the country. Tun is the highest title and is very rarely awarded, followed by Tan Sri and Datuk. In some states there are lesser titles in addition to these.

There are six cities on the board, linked by roads. Every city produces 3 types of goods. There are 3 wagons which start in different cities, and these are shared by all players. At the start of every round each player produces up to 3 goods. This can be all done in one city or split up. If there are wagons in cities waiting for cargo loading, the players do a blind bid to become wagon master. The wagon master can load up to 3 of one type of goods. The others can only load up to 2 of other types of goods, but this is subject to negotiation with the wagon master. They have to agree on a price. The wagon master may choose not to load your goods. Due to the rules for loading goods, sometimes you can guess your opponents' intentions by looking at the number and types of goods they have in the city. Two players each with two red goods may actually hope that a 3rd player with only white goods will become wagon master, so that they won't have to spend on the bidding, and they will still be able to load their goods. But then, the 3rd player may decide to be nasty and not load any of their goods.

The whole game board.

Once loading is done, players start moving wagons. Each player has 4 movement cards numbered 1 to 4, and every round you can only use one of them. Once used they are turned face down, and will only become available after all 4 are used. The wagon master has no control over wagon movement. Anyone can move any wagon. Wagons can only move in one direction, so if you drive a wagon into a road leading to one city, it cannot turn back. This is important because goods can be sold at a higher price in a city not producing the same goods type. Also you may have goods waiting to be picked up at that city.

When a wagon reaches a city, all goods are sold. There is a market mechanism in the game. All goods start cheap, but the prices can increase up to 4 times. However, once the price hits the peak, if someone tries to increase it again, it will crash back to the bottom rung. Before any goods are sold, every player secretly assigns 0, 1 or 2 goods to boost the prices of.

The stock market chart for the 6 goods types. The number on the left is the buying price, and on the right the selling price.

On the left, a wagon, for illustration purposes only. In the real game no one can load 3 types of goods. The shields on the sides of the wagon tell which goods belong to who. On the right, the courier. At the bottom, the disk which you use for secretly assigning two goods types to increase the prices of. You can decide not to push any by pointing both hands at your shield (like in this photo). You can move the game goods type twice, or you can move two different goods types once each.

After you make money, you first pay for upkeep of your title, before spending money to increase up to two steps on the social standing chart. The cost to move up increases as the game proceeds. If you can't pay upkeep, your social standing crashes down to the level which you can pay upkeep for. This can be very painful.

The social standing chart. The number on the left is the upkeep cost to maintain your status.

There are some special powers auctioned off at the start of the game, allowing players to do various fancy stuff, e.g. extra moves for the wagon, adjusting market price, buying goods cheaply. There is a courier piece (a horse rider) in the game. If on your turn you can move a wagon to meet the courier (or vice versa), you get to choose a one-time-use bonus card. These cards have various cool abilities and there are only 3 copies each. They are discarded from the game once used.

The game ends at the end of a round after a certain number of deliveries have been made. For 4 players, it's 8 deliveries.

The Play

Our game started peacefully enough. All goods get loaded, sometimes after some haggling. There were some "misdirecting" of wagons to deny one another the bonus selling price of goods, or to secure it for one's own goods. I was the ambitious one, taking two steps on the social standing chart, when the rest were more conservative and only took one step. Jeff and I monopolised the courier the whole game. We both had special abilities to move the courier and to make the wagon move extra steps. We were the only ones getting bonus cards.

Early in the game, at the city of Genoa. The track above the city indicates the bonus price margin if you deliver goods that are not produced here. This bonus increases every round that no delivery is made, and resets when a delivery is made.

As the game proceeded, I continued to stay in the lead, with everyone else one step behind. This was probably a bad thing, since I was directing all the negative Qi at myself. Advancing early had its benefits, because the cost to advance was cheaper, but then I also had to manage the upkeep cost. Things started going bad when the Broken Axle card struck, played by Jeff. It, of course, hit the wagon which I needed most urgently. The wagon could not move that turn, and my unhappy customers wouldn't pay me because of the delay, despite my pleading and my perfect past record. Ungrateful peasants! Thankfully that round I was still able to pay the upkeep cost. I retained my Datukship, but had no money to progress any further. Everyone else was catching up or overtaking me. Without the Broken Axle, I think the game would have ended that round, and I probably would have won. So the Broken Axle was a very well-timed move by Jeff, who was in last position at that time.

Broken Axle was played on this wagon. I (orange shield) had two black goods, Jeff (blue) had 1 red good, and Afif (pink) 1 red and 1 purple. The track on the left tracks the number of deliveries made and also the cost for promotion. It is also the countdown timer for game end.

Things became quite interesting in the last round. I had the bonus card that allowed me to "naik pangkat" (get promoted) for $1200 per level. In the final round it would cost $3000 per level. However, I was quite low on cash. I had enough cash to pay the $1000 upkeep for the Datukship, and should be able to earn some money that round. Han was a Tan Sri (2nd highest title), and the rest of us were Datuks (3rd highest title). If I could earn some money, I would be able get promoted, possibly even by two levels to Tun. $2400 was not a lot of money. I had been keeping that bonus card precisely for this purpose.

Han (yellow) was the only Tan Sri at the start of the final round. The rest of us were Datuks.

The wagon that had the Broken Axle repaired would hopefully reach its destination (unless Jeff had yet another Broken Axle card). There was another wagon at another city which could load goods and had a chance of making the delivery within this last round. Jeff, Han and Afif all had goods in that city. I had none. When it was time to bid, I thought: although I had no interest in loading goods, from the experience in previous rounds, it was not unusual to spend money to win the wagon master privilege, and then earn back most of it by collecting (cough*bribes*cough) loading fees; then why not try to win the privilege, and charge all of them an arm and a leg? I might make a profit. Afterall it was the last opportunity they had to deliver goods. The other Broken-Axle-fixed wagon had 1 of Jeff's goods and 2 of Afif's. If they decided my price was too high, I could just deny them the loading rights and this last chance of making a delivery. I think I surprised all three of them when I won the wagon master privilege.

This was the wagon that I won wagon master privilege for. I (orange shield) had no goods in this city. From left to right, Afif (pink) had 3 browns and 1 purple, Jeff (blue) had 2 purples and 2 blacks, and Han (yellow) had 3 blacks.

I asked for $900 from each of them to load their goods. Han didn't have enough money and declined. Afif and Jeff discussed for quite some time. The wagon would need at least two players moving it to be able to reach another city, so it was either they both loaded goods (so that they both had an interest in it), or the wagon wouldn't complete a delivery. I think Jeff wanted to load, but Afif decided no. So there was no loading afterall. I was actually secretly hoping to receive this $1800 bribe, although I put on a "take it or leave it" air, lest they try to haggle. When Afif said no, my heart sank. I think I spent $1100 on that privilege which did me no good at all, even though I ruined everyone else's plans.

After the final delivery, Afif could afford to move up one more step to Tan Sri (2nd highest rank). The rest of us only managed to retain our statuses. Afif was winner by tiebreaker, $700 to Han's $500. Jeff at 3rd position beat me by tiebreaker too. He had $1200 and I had $600. If Afif and Jeff had paid me that $1800, I would have had exactly $2400 to upgrade myself two levels to Tun! Too bad they didn't take the bait. Of course they would have made money, but I suspect neither of them would have been able to reach Tun.

What a tense last two rounds it was! My head was actually throbbing a bit from all that scheming and strategising and double guessing.

One hilarious moment in that last round was the market manipulation. I had two black goods delivered, and I knew everyone would be trying to crash the price, to minimise my profit. The black goods price was around the middle of the market chart, i.e. it could easily be pushed over the top and crash. I made a gamble, pushing its price up twice myself. When all the market manipulation disks were flipped over, so many people pushed black that it not only went over the top and crashed, it climbed the whole chart again all the way to the highest price! I raised my arms in exultation, and probably would have howled in delight if we were not at a public place. Then Jeff reminded me - Afif had the Large Office, which could push the price of one good after all the price movements done by the players. Needless to say, black crashed all the way to the bottom. Aarrgghh! Who said Eurogames are all nice and tame? Why am I getting saboteurs wrecking my wagon and unscrupulous market analysts crashing my stock prices?

The Thoughts

Die Handler is a game with quite a number of moving parts - the goods production and delivery, the wagon master bidding and negotiations, the goods prices manipulation, the social status chart, the courier and bonus cards, and the unique abilities auctioned off at game start which impact all of these areas. Thankfully none of these are complex, and amazingly everything ties together quite well.

There is blind bidding / simultaneous secret selection in the game, for the wagon master privilege and for the market price manipulation. So you need to read your opponents. You can try to psycho them to do what you want them to do, via table talk. There is no randomness, since the choices are all made (albeit secretly) by the players. Sometimes your guess will be lucky, sometimes not. This aspect reminds me of Alladin's Dragon, Dungeon Lords and the selling phase of For Sale.

Negotiations is also an important aspect of the game. How much do you charge to let others load their goods? Quite often players need to cooperate due to vested interests in the same things. E.g. they want to move the wagon on which they have goods, or they want to push the price up for a goods type that they are selling this round. There is a tension between cooperating and competing, and also in the negotiations. Negotiation in games can sometimes cause hard feelings (e.g. in Quo Vadis, Greed Incorporated, Chinatown) due to unfairness (perceived or otherwise), so not everyone likes it. It isn't the central mechanism in Die Handler, but it is an important part.

I was surprised to later find out that this game was designed by the team of Wolfgang Kramer and Richard Ulrich, who also designed the highly regarded Princes of Florence and El Grande. Die Handler is a pretty decent medium complexity game. There is zero randomness in the game. It is a very high player interaction game, and cooperation and competition among players are very fluid. We played with four players, and I suspect this is the ideal count. I can't imagine playing this with 2 players. I think it would be rather boring.

Quo Vadis

Quo Vadis is yet another game played at Carcasean. This is a negotiation game by Reiner Knizia, where players control politicians in Rome and try to promote one of their own members to the senate. This is a very clean design, and really is all about negotiations and politics, and you can lie and cheat too, to a certain degree. Nothing is not negotiable.

On the game board there are many big and small committees, and promotion paths from one committee to the next, eventually reaching the senate (not sure whether that's the name, but that's what I call the highest committee). Players place pawns on the bottom level committees for free, but from that point onwards, every promotion to the next committee needs to be voted by the members of the committee where the pawn currently sits. Unless you control a majority in that committee, you will need to get support from other players through clever negotiations. Every time a pawn gets promoted, it collects a victory point chip on the path to the next committee, and the other players who have supported this promotion collect 1VP each. The victory point chips are hidden from other players after you collect them. It won't be easy to remember how many victory points your opponents have collected, but you will have some rough idea. At game end, the player with the most victory points wins. The twist is, he or she must have a pawn in the senate. In the case of ties, whoever reached the senate first (not the one with most pawn in there) wins. So players will be maneuvering to shut others out of the senate, especially the ones who seem to have collected many victory point chips.

This was still early in the game. See the victory point chips on the promotion paths. Whenever one is taken, it is immediately replace with another random chip.

In our game (Michelle, Han, Chong Sean and I), I was the preferred target, because Michelle, Han and Chong Sean all know me better than each other, and thus feel more comfortable bullying me than others. So I was blocked a lot in the early game. We were mostly quite quick in negotiations, and struck deals easily. We never really bothered to track whether promises were made last round or earlier. There is a rule stating that promises made must be fulfilled if possible before the end of the next round. Our game progressed at a good pace.

Chong Sean was the first to secure a place in the senate. I was the last, and only through a deal made with Han. He was basically gambling on whether he would get more victory points than me through that deal. When the VP chips were revealed, I won at 23pts. Michelle had 19pts, and both Chong Sean and Han had 17pts, but Chong Sean beat Han to 3rd place because he reached the senate earlier. In the second half of the game I have been acting like the downtrodden victim, which probably let their guard down.

This is a cunning game. The mechanics are very simple, so it really comes down to the negotiations and the psychology. You can cheat and lie and break promises. It may not be good for you, but a timely betrayal may just win you the game, e.g. shutting a "friend" off from the senate because he or she looks to be having too many VP chips. I think this is a game that needs to be handled with some care. There can be hurt feelings and anger and enemies made. Just remember it's only a game.

I'm not planning to buy this myself. I think this needs 4 or 5 players to be good, and I don't have that often. It is quite a different type of game, where you are manipulating people. I wouldn't mind playing this now and then, but not too much. And with people who can take it only, of course. Thankfully the game we played turned out OK. We played very briskly and I guess we also took it quite lightly. I think that's the right attitude to play this.

Monopoly Here and Now Edition

On Sun 30 Mar 2008, Michelle and I played Monopoly: Here and Now Edition . It is basically the same game, differences being cosmetic only. I bought it primarily because of the London factor, same reason as why I bought On The Underground. My wife Michelle used to study in London, so most of the new property names in this version would be familiar to her. The other reason I bought it is I wanted to see how it plays when played by the correct rules. At BoardGameGeek, playing Monopoly is like blasphemy to some people. This is because for many people who have played lots of Monopoly before and then discovered better modern German-style games, indeed Monopoly would seem a very poor game. However Monopoly may be a victim of it's popularity in the mainstream market. To most boardgame hobbyists it probably symbolises outdated, bad games, thus it gets lots of bad ratings at BoardGameGeek, some of which may be lower than what they would be, if Monopoly weren't that prominent in the mainstream market (and have so ridiculously many different themed versions - zoos, fishing, dogs, DIY, family photos, dinosaurs, The Simpsons, Star Wars - I've seen all of these). Also apparently many people don't play Monopoly correctly, e.g. there should be no jackpot at the Free Parking space (I never played with this rule myself so I'm not sure of the details), and if you land on a property and decide not to buy it at the listed price, it will be auctioned to all, including you (I didn't know this in the past).

This Here and Now Edition doesn't come with paper money. Instead, it comes with 6 debit cards and a card reader that looks a bit like a calculator. You use this card reader to manage earning money, paying money and also giving money to another player. At first I thought this would be too troublesome and inefficient, but it turned out to be OK.

In our game, Michelle managed to buy the whole set of yellow properties (Regent Street set). For all other property groups neither of us were able to purchase the whole set. By the time Michelle started to build apartments, things started to look bleak. It seemed I was destined to die a slow death, as Michelle slowly built up her yellow set, and I had no chance of ever collecting a complete set. Then later I managed to convinced her to make a trade. It was a slightly biased trade. I let her complete the pink set (Wembley Stadium set), and she let me complete the orange set (Tate Modern set), and in addition I gave her an airport, so that she had three and I had one. By itself it was a good trade for Michelle, but considering the situation, if she had played completely ruthlessly, she wouldn't have accepted the offer, because it gave me a chance to come back. It gave me a completed set, which was crucial.

And come back I did. I built up to hotel level, and Michelle was unlucky to land on my hotels a few times, and I was also lucky not to land on her more expensive yellow properties for some time. It seemed my numerous effort to persuade her to trade paid off. That single trade of the game gave me a fighting chance to win the game. However it was not meant to be afterall. I started landing on Michelle's properties again and soon went bankrupt.

Michelle holding up the card reader. I had prepared some plastic poker chips to be used as currency, but because the denomination range was not enough (only 10K to 1M, but we needed some 5M too), we decided to just use the debit cards and card reader that come with the game.

You have airports instead of railway stations, and the utilities have changed from Electricity and Water Works to Telecoms and The Sun (a newspaper).

One of the debit cards, and some of the player pieces - airplane, mobile phone, skateboard, roller blades and the London double-decker bus.

A close-up of the card reader. You insert your card on the right to pay money, and on the left to earn money. You insert cards on both sides if one player is to pay another.

Michelle's yellow set during its early stage of development. A hotel was placed in the background for comparison. The apartments were meant to be stacked on top of one another, but we preferred to place them this way because it is easier to see.

All six debit cards. The smart chip is fake. The small oval shaped indents are what the card reader reads.

My orange set all proudly upgraded to hotels. Unfortunately I later had to sell them off to pay rent. The hotels are designed poorly. They topple over easily.

An aerial view of the full board.

I was feeling very lucky to be landing right between the majestic hotels.

The game lasted about 2 hours. If I were to evaluate Monopoly the same way I evaluate the usual Euro games that I play, then I'd say that's too long a play time considering the amount of interesting decisions I get to make in the game. Monopoly is not so good when played with two because the opportunities for trading is less, and luck factor is higher in terms of who can collect a full set, like in our game. More players means little chance of a player collecting a full set of properties all by himself / herself. This would force players to trade. We only invoked one auction in the game. So playing this rule right didn't make much difference, but then maybe we were just too used to the old way. We just kept buying and rarely bothered to remember that invoking an auction was an option. So I'm not sure whether the auctions contribute much to gameplay. It didn't in our game. I invoked an auction when I landed on The Sun (a utility, which was formerly Water Works), because Michelle already owned the other utility, and I was hoping to make her pay more to get the second utility. I bid up the price, but Michelle didn't take the bait and just let me buy it. I ended up paying more than what I would have paid if I hadn't invoke the auction. Needless to say, I felt rather stupid.

One important rule that I didn't play right in the past is that you can buy houses and hotels any time. You don't need to land on your property to do so. That makes things better. Less luck dependent. Another one is when you roll a double, you still do everything as normal (e.g. you can buy property, you need to pay rent), just that you get another turn. In the past when I played you don't do anything when you roll a double, you just roll again.

There is another unofficial rule I remember which I have used before - if you land on Free Parking, wherever you land on on your next turn, you don't need to pay rent. I have no idea where this rule came from, but at least it jives with the Free Parking.

After playing Monopoly again, this time making sure I follow all rules correctly, and don't use any variant rules, I went to Boardgamegeek to rate it. I realised I have not rated it before. Probably I had already thought of playing with the proper rules before rating it. After having done so, I thought Monopoly isn't that bad. Granted there is some nostalgia factor, but it really isn't that devoid of strategy. There are things that you can do to mitigate luck. And the luck factor does even out somewhat. There is some "engine building", as Eurogamers call it. There is the lucky draw fun factor because of the dice. So it's not a game I'd hate, and I don't mind playing it once in a while. I just need to remind myself to play with 4 players next time, which I suspect is the ideal number.

I gave it a 6.