City Tycoon, 15 January 2014

Five at Adrian's on Wednesday for a go at City Tycoon, the clever tile placement, set chaining, cube moving optimisation game.  It took us a while to get back into the rules and remember the variant strategies.  Kieron managed to snooker himself a couple of times early on by having to place water tiles that blocked off his districts from each other.  Adrian was very grateful to be reminded by Andy and James of the chaining tactic that he'd employed the previous time he'd played (a good while ago).  Everyone apart from James kept missing the free resource cubes in the central zone and then kicking ourselves later.  After two and a half hours of intense play it was clear that, despite a last round surge from Stu, the chaining tactics were not to be beaten. Final scores:  Adrian 48; Stu 41; James 39; Kieron 36; Andy 32.

City Tycoon and Samurai Card Game - 29 February

A quorum formed on the first Wednesday Rivals games session ever to be held on a leap day for two cracking games:

City Tycoon, a clever game of building city blocks with different buildings and supplying them with water, electricity and goods to gain victory points. 3 strategies emerged;

• James decided to go for the big hitting buildings which gained 4 or 5 VPs straight away as well as linking the support buildings cleverly to gain extra VPs almost every time he delivered anything.
• Orhan went for the monopoly of water and electricity plants
• Kieron went for yellow buildings (and their supporting ones) and a network of goods producing buidings which also provided VPs

James took an early lead which proved to be too much. With Orhan and Kieron closing towards the end James won with 42, Orhan had 36 and Kieron 30.

As we played this game in a little over an hour, we had time for Samurai (the card game) by our old favourite Reiner Knizia. What an ingenious game this is! I cannot believe it is so low down on BGG as it has the potential to be a classic. Cards are laid down in a chequerboard pattern with village cards in the gaps. You have to gain control of villages by surrounding them with more control points than your opponents. When you do this you gain shapes (triangles, squares and/or circles). If you do not hold the majority in any of these at the game end then you score zero! If you have a majority then you can score but your score is equal to the number of shapes you gained that were not in your majority! This means that you have to keep your eye on several things; what shaped villages are coming up in the stock pile, what shapes your opponents are collecting and what villages are being fought over on the table. This is a game that is much more fun played at speed (methinks) - we did our best on this, even James who spent a bit more time analysing and consequently won!

Points James 12, Orhan 6 and Kieron 0 after being pipped by James on the circles and having no majority.

Those numerically inclined might spot a pattern in the scores in both games to complement the numerically interesting date!

City Tycoon - 18 January 2012

After settling us down with cups of tea, David sadly and suddenly developed a migraine, so we decamped to James' place whilst David went to sleep it off.

We set City Tycoon back up and Kieron whizzed through the rules for Orhan and Stuart, and we kicked off.  Another fun game of this, although as Stuart noted, not huge amounts of interaction between the players - with one exception when Kieron built next to James' electricity plant and "stole" supplies that round, we generally built up our own suburbs.  James pulled away early with the others tussling for the other places, but the gap started to close in the later rounds.  Final scores: James 41, Orhan 35 (noting just in time as we were packing up he'd missed one final victory point), Kieron 34 and Stuart 31.

Get well soon David!

City Tycoon, 21 December

Pre-Christmas games at Adrian's with Guest Gamer Felix and we tried out City Tycoon, Kieron's birthday pressie. This new, semi-abstract game involves the players creating a tile city grid of power plants and buildings. Once buildings are built, powering them with electricity or water cubes (generated by the power plants) creates money to buy new buildings, or goods which in turn can be used to acquire victory points or intermediate benefits. It took us a few turns to get the hang of the game but we then realised its subtlety and cleverness. Not only a cracker in terms of gameplay, the design is also attractive and the construction solid. All in all a great little game. For this first play, the power of combiner cards meant that Adrian developed a pretty unstoppable lead. The final scores were Adrian 35; James 28; Kieron 27; Felix 26 and Andy 18.