Glory to Rome (#95 on BGG) is one of the new ones. It’s mostly a card game, where the cards can be used as citizens, resources, gold or buildings depending on how you play it. Sarah and I had played a few games on Thursday and Friday and Rich joined in on Saturday. It really was a trial by fire for Rich – the game isn’t that hard to learn, but there are a lot of interactions going on which you’re really not going to pick up first game.

And this was a brutal first game for Rich, as I built the Colosseum, which allowed me to steal clients from both Sarah and Rich and convert them into gold. (Yes, I enslaved their clients, sent them against the lions, and pocketed the winnings). Losing clients in GtR is absolutely brutal, as they’re the main way of increasing the efficiency of your position. There are ways to protect yourself against the Colosseum, but neither Rich nor Sarah built one, and – as a result – they both fared really badly.

I like the game very much: the buildings come together to make some very interesting interactions, and I value that in a game. I do want to play this game 4-player, where it has its sweet spot. That will likely be for a future occasion when people aren’t going to Big Events like they are in the next couple of weeks.

Double Agent (#4354) is light little 2-player game which Sarah and I played a couple of hands of whilst waiting for Rich. It’s fast, it’s furious, and it’s fun. It isn’t quite as mind-breakingly brutal as Battleline, but there’s a great bluffing element in the game which Sarah and I both used to our advantage… or occasionally, disadvantage.

Sarah was really tired when I first taught her the game on Thursday, and somehow completely misinterpreted the rules, thinking that the *cards* added to the loyalty of the spy. Once we cleared that misconception up, then things went a lot more smoothly. Basically, you secretly place loyalty markers (1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 5) on each of six spies, and then assign file cards (worth varying points) to those spies. When a spy has 4 files (or 3 if a neighbouring spy has been already revealed), you reveal the loyalty values that you and your opponent have on the spy, with the higher value taking all the files. When 5 spies are revealed, you then total up the points with more points winning you the game.

It plays in 10-15 minutes, but Sarah and I found more and more ways to bluff as the game went on. Some of the cards can be played for special effects, and in our first game Sarah worked out the loyalty numbers on my three remaining spies… and realised that she’d lose every single contest there, and thus the game.

The second game saw me swapping loyalty values and files here and there to confuse Sarah, but it only succeeded in confusing myself. I let Sarah place four files on her side of one spy loyal to her, and she thus gained a big pay-off. I recovered somewhat, but a Booby Trap eliminated some of my points and despite winning most of the remaining spies, the rewards were nowhere near as big. Game to Sarah.

Acquire (#89) is a game I’ve played a couple of times before – once in the past five years, and once when I was at Uni – but with MilSims putting the latest (inferior) version on sale for $22, I finally picked it up. Sarah, Rich and I had a game of it which I dominated, Rich did okay, and Sarah bombed out spectacularly.

Perhaps appropriately, it was the Sackson chain that ended up dominating the board (at 41 tiles), with the other competitors only making 5 tiles at most. Sarah was quite downhearted as she rarely drew interesting tiles, and was forced to watch Rich and me performing the mergers. Then too, Sarah ran out of money fairly early in, and didn’t trade in shares for money when the mergers did happen. 

My feeling is with Acquire is that you really want liquid capital at all times. Rich and I gained a few early shareholder bonuses, which helped hugely. Acquire is unlikely to be a game we’ll get out often, but it’s a good one to own.

Thebes (#155) is a pretty enjoyable 2-player game, and it’s one which Rich has been winning quite a bit of recently. (It’s okay 3 player, but should be avoided as a 4-player game). Sarah really likes the game, but as she wanted to test her latest Magic deck with Daniel, she could only look on with envy as Rich and I played a game.

This game was hilarious as it began with a lot of the three specific knowledges turning up at the very beginning of the game: indeed, a lot of knowledge came our way very early, which meant we spent most of 1901 just picking up knowledge cards. Rich got slightly the better of me here.

I countered by going to the dig sites slightly before Rich, with the aid of a couple of shovels I was feeling good about my chances. As it happened, I did get a couple of good initial digs, but after that my luck dried up and though I got the three treasures from each site that I wanted to complete exhibitions, they weren’t that high-value.

Rich got most of the high-value ones as he cleaned up behind me.

The third year saw us digging in the early part and then finally doing as many exhibitions as we could manage: two for Rich and four for me. I also attended three congresses to Rich’s two, but in the end it was Rich’s greater knowledge and treasures that won him the game – although he was quite sure he’d lost given my late burst of point-scoring.

Alien Frontiers (#97) came out as Rich and I were joined by Shane and Ben, who were waiting for a delayed D&D session to start. As a dice-rolling-worker-placement game, I prefer it immeasurably to Kingsburg, and after I explained the rules to Shane and Ben, they were well on the way to thrashing the pants off Rich and me. It actually wasn’t that bad, although my final score was painfully low.

The most amusing thing about this game was seeing how Resource Cache would come out only to be discarded on the first possible roll. Heh. This happened three times during the game: to Rich twice, incredibly. Of course, the reason it happened to Rich twice was because after I retrieved the Cache from the discard pile (with 5 ships, so it couldn’t get discarded), Rich stole it from me with a raid. Urgh!

Ben had a very good early game and quickly built up to 5 ships, as did Shane. Ben was more aggressively in the better position though, so everyone else ganged up on him, stripping him of his bonus ships. Unfortunately, this left the door open for Shane who moved up to six ships, and then started crashing them into the planet to terraform them. When you have someone who is able to roll triples and then use the construction platform as well as terraform in the same turn – and somehow never seems to run out of resources – you’re looking down the barrel, and we had an entire turn around the table to know our doom was coming and not be able to stop it.

Cyclades (#94) is a new hybrid (Euro/Ameritheme) game set in Ancient Greece, where you attempt to create two metropolises on some islands. There are troops and ships which can fight each other, and finally there are five gods to petition for aid, and its that last which makes the game very interesting.

Effectively, you auction off each of the gods – and, in the 2-5 player game, not all of the gods are available each turn. Auctioning works pretty much like Amun-Re: You put down a bid for a god, but if you’re overbid you must bid for another god. 

The gods are…

* Zeus, who makes petitioning cheaper and hiring mythological creatures easier.

* Ares, who allows you to create armies and attack those of other players

* Poseidon, who allows you to create fleets and attack those of other players

* Athene, who doesn’t do much… except make metropolises easier to found

* Apollo, who doesn’t do much… except give you gold and increases your income.

Rich was the only one to really use Athene’s wisdom, and he almost won the game with her. Sarah looked to be doing pretty well early on, so Rich and I ganged up on her and reduced her to one island. Rich then used the buildings she had on her island to build his first metropolis, and then took a fourth philosopher from Athene to build his second. All was set for him winning this inaugural game.

Except… I had Zeus, and Zeus allowed me to cycle through the mythological creatures available until I found Pegasus which allowed me to invade Rich’s territory and capture his second Metropolis, thus giving me the win. It felt like a pretty cheap way of winning (and it was a real cointoss as to who won the battle). However, it’s one of those things which I think will be ameliorated when we (a) know the game better and (b) play it with more players. I really want to play Cyclades with four or five players, where the auctions will get a lot tougher.

Of course, the main reason I beat Rich is because I had a lot (and I mean a lot) more money than he did, and was able to pay Zeus to cycle through the creature cards. The game feels like it can be swingy, but also like there are some interesting strategies to discover. 

It’s also a pretty fast game – only 90 minutes for the full game, and it was a learning game. I think this will hit the table again. Did I also mention it has really cool plastic miniature pieces?

Le Havre (#6) was our final game of the day. Unfortunately for both Rich and me, Sarah has played this game more than us by a fair amount, and recently as well. I’ve played more than Rich, and so that’s how the eventual scores turned out – Sarah on 200+, me on 150+ and Rich on 100+. Or something like that.

My big downfall was I was unable to build enough ships, although I did build some of the best buildings (including the four last ones in the game). Sarah got her ships early (and loans), and Rich likewise followed with some good ships, but when it came to the late game, Sarah just ran away with upgrading goods whilst Rich tried to gain some value out of a fish market. Let me tell you: shipping steel is so, so much more effective than using smoked fish or just building without feeding your men. I had to take some loans, but got them down to 1 before the game ended.

I find Le Havre to be a relatively opaque game (unlike its cousin, Agricola), but guessing that I lost wasn’t that difficult. We’d need to play a lot more of this game to get good at it, but I’m not entirely sure that it’s fun enough to warrant that. Through the Ages is lots and lots of fun, so Rich and I play it a lot, even with its 2+ hour playing time. Le Havre doesn’t strike me as being that fun.

It’s a pity we didn’t get in a 3-handed TTA game, but it’d been a pretty good day of gaming nonetheless. (Rich and I might get a go of his rather late birthday present next week, as Sarah’s off to the Magic: the Gathering Nationals. Oh, and a TTA game as well).