Game Night

Last night was Game Night, and I decided to take a break from Train Games. Tom Vasel recently stated that I was a "hard-core euro gamer," a sentiment that I was beginning to question. What are these Euro games? Do they have trains? Ha. Not a big deal, or even a topic worthy of discussion, but it did make me want to pull out some games (or at least one) that were of the European form. So, what did we play? I will now use the fancy list function to show you:

1. Martinique
2. Hey! That's My Fish!
3. Amyitis (the game Mike, not the disease)
4. Hey! That's My Fish! (now with 4)
5. La Strada (Age of Steam light)

Martinique is a two player game from Emanuele Ornella that came out last year at Essen. The game is played out on a 8x8 grid. Your goal, as a pirate, is to find the buried treasure on this island. You move your pirate crew around the island picking up clues to the treasure as well as loot. Each column is marked by a letter, and each row has a number. Each space thus has a numeric and alphabetic identifier tile. At the start of the game, two of these tiles are removed, marking the space that the treasure is buried in. At the end of the game, the player who can guess the location of the treasure wins. Z-Man games is releasing the game soon, and I am glad to hear it. Martinique is a great family game and a fun way to kill 30 minutes while waiting for other gamers. The rules are pretty simple, and while it's not the most thinky deduction game, thinky isn't even a word.

I don't need to say much about Hey! That's My Fish! The game is great. It plays great with 2 and 3 and 4. I won both games but cutting off tremendous chunks of ice and floating my penguins to the win.

Now to Amyitis. Given that we have played Winsome and Wallace games for the past year and a half, I haven't had shown my love for Amyitis. But that doesn't mean that I don't have tremendously fond memories of this great game. In fact, my memory told me that the game was hard to learn. My memory was mistaken, for I was able to pick up the rules rather quickly while waiting for it to stop raining. It didn't stop raining, but I did re-learn the rules.

The goal of Amyitis is to win. You win by getting the most victory points. Pretty cool, huh? Oh, right, I'll actually say something. The thing about Amyitis is that you can get victory points in a bunch of ways. But the heart of the game is planting sections of the garden. Each section of the garden has a tile on it at the start of the game. The sections are of differing qualities and you need to use appropriate plant cards for those sections. You plant sections by gaining resources and moving a camel on the camel board to a planting spot. But a space also has to be irrigated.

(I see now why I didn't want to go into detail. This game is hard to explain.)

I'll put it this way, there are a bunch of different things that you need to control in this game. You need to manage resources, money, the camel board, the priest spaces, and the special ability cards. You also need to pay close attention to what other people are doing and your location in the turn order. In the end, everything meshes together wonderfully, making this a great game.

After a quick game of Hey! That's My Fish!, we played La Strada. La Strada is sort of like Age of Steams incredibly light sibling. La Strada takes away all of the goods shipments of Age of Steam and instead focuses on track building. Your goal is to connect your starting villa to different towns (of different) values on the board. BUT, each additional person that connects to an area reduces it's value to everyone that is connected to it. So you need to carefully figure out where you want to go and you need to try to stop other people from getting there. It's good fun that plays out in about 30 minutes.

That's it. Next week we will probably play Age of Industry, Martin Wallace's redoing of Brass (one of the most brilliant games ever and not at all in need of a redoing).