Session Reports

Last night, Mike and Dan come over for our Wednesday night gaming session. In sum, we played an Unpublished Prototype, the new Martin Wallace Game: Automobile, and two games of Fairy Tale. Below are some quick thoughts.

Unpublished Prototype: I continue to be impressed with this great game. It has been consistently fun to play over it's entire player range (2-4) and I look forward to it's Essen release.

Automobile: Okay, first of all, this is not Lokomotive Werks. So, moving on, this is a very interesting economic game. In Automobile, the general idea is that you build factories to produce cars subject to unknown demand. Furthermore, factories have increasing levels of technology and older factories net you dollar losses at the end of each turn. So, you are not only forced to deal with an unknown market for the cars that you produce but you also need to constantly upgrade or at least keep loss management in mind as the game progresses. Along the way you are able to enlist the help of automobile visionaries such as Henry Ford or Chrysler as well as use your distributors to help sell your cars. All of these thematic elements combine to create a game that is somewhat difficult to teach but one turn in you definitely understand the flow of the game. I doubt that any of our game play was optimized last night, but we all enjoyed it. AND, the game played in a perfect amount of time (60 minutes). I have heard people say that their games took over two hours, and I can only say that I don't want to play with them. If this one took 2 hours, I would probably not like it. But in 60-90 minutes, it's great.

Fairy Tale: After listing to Giles Pritchard's On Board Game comments on this great filler led me to pull it out last night and two games later I will admit that I should have done it sooner. Fairy Tale seems to lead to that "zone" type playing where everyone is simply having a great time. Enough said. Great game, great times.