Tuesday, September 26, 2006

EuroGame Retreat ON!!! - Copied And Pasted From Imagine Games



Finally, the EuroGame Retreat is ON!!!

Now scheduled for Awana Resort, 15 minutes before Genting Highlands, we have 12 confirmations after the first day, and more are expected in the next 24 hours.

Here is the schedule:
Saturday, 7 October
-----------------------
830-900: Arrival.
900-1100: Game #1 (including tea break).
1100-100: Game #2.
100-200: Lunch.
200-400: Game #3.
400-500: Game #4 (including tea break).
500-600: Game #5.
600-800: Break & Dinner.
800-whenever: Free Play.

Sunday, 8 October
---------------------
800-900: Breakfast.
900-1030: Game #6.
1030-1200: Game #7.
1200-1230: Wrap Up.

Game nominations will be mailed out tonight to all confirmed participants, who will then be given 48 hours to nominate 7 games they would like to see played in the 7-game tournament.

Participants will then be mailed the final nomination list for voting.

Rules for the 7 games will then be mailed to all participants one week ahead of the retreat.

Total cost for 1 night twin share accommodation, lunch, dinner, breakfast and 2 tea-breaks is only Rm200!

Please email now to confirm your place if you haven’t done so already :0

Originally posted on Imagine Games

Want To Buy A Game?

I am in the mood to get some new games. So if you want to save some money and pool orderes with me then head on to Imagine Games and choose your games. My pooling our order you will get free shipping. The price of each game is as printed on the site. I'm ordering somewhere in the begining of next month. The order, if in stock, will arrive the very next day.

Friday, September 22, 2006

Of Smartness and Railroads

Of course i can spell smrt....it is spelled as smart! See? You can't fool a smrt person and I are smrt!

Now for the Railroad Tycoon (RRT) short review. Got it last Saturday, tried it on Sunday. Mind you, the box size is deceiving. It houses the most freaking biggest gameboard i have ever seen AND it needs to be separated into 3 different pieces with each piece big enough for any boardgame you have. This gives an epic feel to the game. All the accesories are also top notch. Only complaint is 3 of my engines come with broken chutes but nothing some super glue can't fix:)

Tried it out with a 2 player game with Joey. It was a typical 1st game experience. Play and refer to the rulebook at the same time. We...erm...I mean I made a few mistakes that we didn't realize until later that night when i read the rulebook "thoroughly" most notably the following:-

- The 1st player "MUST" bid. I realized this is not right after I paid 1k for like 6 consecutive rounds. Wasted all my money.
- Each player can only do "ONE" action during a turn. This is because I smrtly concluded the player can only do the following, 1st action: auction, 2nd action: one round of any one of the actions (instead of 3 rounds), 3rd action: income & dividends.
- The 2nd point make me conclude we can only build a link with a maximum of 4 tracks.

The worst thing was I won the game. I just pray/hope Joey doesn't think i did the above on purpose coz he can whoop my arse with one hand tied behind his back. Sorry Joey! But it was fun though. Can't wait to play it again after the pre-release of Magic:TG Time Spiral this weekend.

p.s. Dope...I will prove to you guys my Puerto Rico victory is no fluke. Till nextime "warehouse boy"!

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Puerto Rico is still cool!

Haha, I was contemplating putting up a post about our session last Friday but was too lazy. Good thing too coz Y!pp!e ended up doing it so that saved me the trouble :) As he mentioned, it was a good gaming night and darkelf & I made two new friends thru Puerto Rico.

As for Y!pp!e's victory in the first game, I feel he did play pretty well and used his astute strategy and positioning right from the start. From sitting right smack between the 2 new guys who didn't know what to do, to 'teaching' them how to play the game and 'what to do', the path to victory was inevitable..

Haha, just ribbing ya, mate!

Anyway, as Y!pp!e mentioned, I pretty much tuned out in the second game after making the darndest brainfart right in the first turn. I still cannot explain what made me do it, but someone chose Builder and my first building for the game? A small warehouse. Yup. So much stuff to store... wait a second, I'm not even producing anything yet so... arrgh! And from that point on the game was as good as gone for me. With no goods and no way to generate income bar prospector and other roles with gold on them, I couldn't get my first production building till a few turns later and by that time it was impossible for me to catch up. GG

Still, all was not lost as I still enjoyed the night and watching Peter hoard all the corn. Man, he had more corn than you can poke a stick at, and with a warehouse to protect it he was raking in the points. Definately a good victory for him.

After that game we were pretty much beat for the night and given that it was already past midnight we decided to call it a night. Hmm.. 3 nights in a sentence. Definately overusing it haha.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to organizing another game session with Y!pp!e's help so stay tuned to this blog. We'll post more info as it comes along.

P/s - Y!pp!e, waving fish snacks around in front of cat is not the smartest thing to do. You can spell smart, right. SMRT! hahahaha

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Session report 15/9/06

A bunch of us had a game session at The Vault on the 15th. It was the 1st time we did it at night and in The Vault. Thanx to Wearn for opening up! The confirmed attendees for the night were Wearn, Peter, Conteng and yours truly. But to our utmost surprise Hans da' man showed up. Seems like my tactic of "making him feel guilty for abandoning us" did work:P After buying snacks and loitering around trying to settle down we finally started a 5 player game of Puerto Rico around 9pm.

Suffice to say, we spent some time explaining the rules to Peter and Conteng who were joining us for the 1st time. Once they got a grip of the game, it was pretty smooth flowing from then on. Halfway through the game Terrence dropped by but he gotta leave to catch a movie. THANX FOR DROPPING BY DUDE! Was really nice of him to show up just to show us some support. The game started Hans try to build Starbucks and make cigars but failed. Barely have any Victory Points halfway through the game. Wearn was trying to understand how the goes having played it before some time ago. He did make some good moves notably monopolizing tobacco. Conteng and Peter was spending their time getting into the groove. Me? I was multi-producing 4 types of crops just to diversify and building some of the better buildings available. The 1st game ended around 10.30 with me being the victor:)

Then Hans got to leave and to our delight, Joey showed up! sweeet! So off we go again trying to "make" the best island. With Joey showing up, my previous game strategy was basically screwed. He made lots of unexpected but wise decisions that left me reeling trying to catch up. But unfortunately, the player who benefited most from Joey is Peter who was sitting next to Joey. Peter even have the galls to build a large warehouse and store 80% of the available corn cubes. So during the Craftsman phase, no much corn is available for harvest. dang! Wearn kinda switched off from the game after confessing he made a wrong move and that demoralised him. Hope this doesn't scar him for life!:) Conteng did some cool moves too. He did Hospice and University so all his stuff comes fully powered. But it wasn't enough to stop Peter from running away with victory. Good Game!

Went back around 12+...it was an enjoyable gaming experience for all of us to say the least...Thanx everybody for showing up!!!

Stay tuned for a first session report on Railroad Tycoon!


p.s. Wearn's cat, AhBoo nearly bit me after i tried to save our snacks...scared the living hell outa me. Note to self, cut down on snacks during games.

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Ticket to Ride - Online


















Days of wonder web site lets U play 4 games online and T2R is one of them. The game interface is well laid out, all one has to do is drag and drop. The best thing is, "IT's FREE".

Yup! its not a typing mistake......"IT's FREE". One may register for a free account at www.daysofwonder.com, with limitations of course. One can only join a game created by other players.

The downside of this online version:-
1. 1st time loading is gonna be hell. (My advice, prepare some snacks and drinks cause U gonna need it).
2. People there usually don't speak English. Lotz of Germans.

Other then the 2 points mentioned above, all in all I think its ok.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Gaming Session

Heya,

Just a quick post to let people know that there will be a gaming session at the Vault tomorrow night, Friday (15 September '06) starting at 8.30pm.

HongY!pp!e will be bringing some friends so do join us if you can make it.

See you there!

Redesign

I really wished that we have gotten the invite to try out Blogger Beta. I never thought that I would consider catagorising our postings on the blog.

So I am trying this make shift thing. Changing to a better blog service is an option but that is silly.

My Look At - Ra


Ra! Ra! Ra! Only one game that could make completely innocent gamer chant the name of an ancient pagan Egyptian god. Ra is a Reiner Knizia game published by Rio Grande, a combination that will not wrong you.

Ra is at its core is an auction game for 3 to 5 players and could be played in about 60 minutes. The goal of the game is to be the one who scores the most points. The games comes in a medium small sides box, inside you will get a board used for auctions, hundreds of cardboard tiles, a bag to put it all in, scoring cardboard counters with denominations, a think wooden Ra silhouette figure, and some wooden sun disks (chips) used for bidding.

The game play is cunning. Players has to constantly evaluate the value of tiles and sun disk on the board. In the beginning of the game each player randomly chooses a fixed pile sun disks. Each turn a player may either draw a tile from the bag and place it on the board, play a god tile, or invoke Ra.

The types of tiles vary. The tile types are Culture, Monuments, Pharaohs, Flood/River, Gold, Gods, Catastrophe and Ra. Players gets points if the player posses at least 3 different culture tiles, players gets minus points for not having at least 1 culture tile. The player with the most pharaoh gets points while the player with the least amount of pharaohs gets minus points. River tiles gives one point each only if the player also posses a flood tile which also give one point. Gold tiles gives three points. Catastrophe tiles takes makes player discard tiles. God tiles lets player discard it for a tile on the board. Monument tiles only score at the end of the game, Monuments score for every set of unique and set of identical tiles. Ra tiles invokes Ra. All these tiles except Ra could only be obtained in auctions.

So what happens when one invokes Ra in the game? An auction. Beginning with the player to the left of the one who invoked Ra players place bets in the form of sun disks. Each sun disk has a fixed value and no two are the game. The auction is for every tile on the board plus the sun disk in the middle of the board. The winning disk replaces the central disk and is up for grabs in the next auction. If voluntarily invoked the player who called Ra must bid if every one else passes. If involuntarily invoked by drawing a Ra tile or by filling up the auction board with tiles all players may pass. The auction continues or all tiles are discarded if the board if full.

Constantly players have to weigh the value on the board. Is it valuable to me? Is it valuable to someone else? Should I call Ra and chance winning the tiles? Should I wait? Or Should I throw others game by calling Ra while the board is mostly empty?

The possibility is endless and balanced. Players with high sun disk must chance loosing it to someone else to be used in the next round and getting a risk a smaller sun disk for the next round. A player that constantly calls Ra might find himself running out of sun disks early and so on.

The game is played in 3 scoring rounds. A round ends when all sun disks are used or when the bard is filled with Ra tiles. In the last round Sun Disks and Monuments also scores.

The game is excellent. It has the element of openness, balance and deduction that I love in a board game. Like I said earlier: When you see Reiner Kenizia and Rio Grande on the same box, you can not go wrong.

Monday, September 11, 2006

Egyptian Games

Last weekend was a good gaming week for us. We did Ra, Citadels and a new addition to our library, Cleopatra! SWEET! I was late on Saturday so i missed out on a few Ra sessions but i managed to play it twice so i guess it was ok. Generally the 2 games i played in, i chanted Ra the most..RA! RA! RA! Have no idea how to play the game so just do stupid stuff to analyze the game more. Sad to say, i still know nuts bout the game. Missed out on Citadels coz was playing magic for a while. Check out the previous blog for a review on Citadels.

darkelf bought Cleopatra before the shop closed so we did it on Sunday. Building up the palace was nice. I did this game twice too. Well ntneko and darkelf did it thrice but their first game was more of a test run. I was fed to the crocodile in my first game for being too corrupt. Sad...i became a tasty morsel...i m not gonna go into details bout this game coz i think ankabut will do a better review when he experienced the game but it was fun trying to build stuff without being too corrupt. Makes me wonder if the local contractors are like that. Maybe our government can feed the contractors who put in "shady" tenders to our local crocodiles...That would be nice:)

Several moons ago, August 27th to be exact, LonelyGamer put up a comment on the blog posting. We are just wondering, LonelyGamer are you based in ipoh? If yes, do hook up with us. Mail me or something. You can reach me at bortacks@hotmail.com. Hope to see you around.

Also we have suggestions for Friday nites gaming. Any takers?

Friday, September 08, 2006

My Look At Citadels


Citadels is a highly recommended card game of intrigue, strategy and deduction. The game consist of a wooden crown token some plastic orange candy looking tokens for gold and lots of cards that are shorter in width then standard cards. The most current version of Citadels also includes cards from its expansion Dark cities hitch consist of 14 purple district cards most with special abilities and 10 cards representing influential characters of the kingdom. The expansion however does not actually feel like an expansion but more like a variation of the game as the expansion is meant mainly to replace cards and add very little to the deck.

The game seems very simple at first. The goal is to score the most points by being the first to build the most extravagant citadel (8 buildings) with the most variety of districts (5). Each turn a player chooses a prominent figure of the kingdom (9) to influence. The player may then either take 2 gold coins or draw 2 building cards, place one of the cards in the bottom of the building deck and the other into his or her hand. Now the player may choose to pay and build a building. Arther that the next player takes his or her turn.

But that is not all for there are twists to the game. At the beginning of each round the player with the crown marker (marks the first player) takes the deck of influential figures, shuffles it, place a fixed number of cards face down and a fixed number of cards face up, based on the number of players. That player then chooses whom to influence and then pases the deck to his or her left. The influential figures determent the players turn sequence, determines who gets the crown token next turn and gives each player a unique ability.

This element of influential figures and the special ability that they give that adds the intrigue, strategy and deduction to the game. Abilities ranges from making a player with the targeted influential figure skip their turn to the ability to add a gold for each building of the same district and the ability to destroy a building.

Citadels has the components, game play and price that makes it a must have in any game library. It does not take a long time to play making it perfect for a filler game or as a main game.

Welcome The Month Of Ramadan



My favorite month of the year is fast approaching. As a sign of respect to the holy month of Ramadan we will not be any Night Game Session until after Ramadan.

Happy Ramadan to all Muslims out there, may all your deeds during the month of Ramadan be plenty and is accepted by Allah and see you at the mosque!

Thursday, September 07, 2006

New arrivals at the Vault

Heya all,

Is it me or is Ankabut the only person posting on this list? C'mon guys, show some support and blab on the blog. Interested in a particular game? Post about it and get some feedback. Want to request a specific title? You can do that here too!

Anyways, a bunch of new games are now in store at the Vault, here's the list:

01. El Grande Decennial Edition
02. Caylus
03. Settlers of Catan
04. Cleopatra & the Society of Architects
05. Warrior Knights
06. Thurn & Taxis
07. World of Warcraft
08. Pirate's Cove
09. Tigris & Euphrates
10. Princes of Florence
11. Ticket to Ride: Marklin Edition
12. Carcassonne
13. Goa
14. Ra
15. Beowulf
16. Railroad Tycoon
17. Lost Cities
18. Citadels

Whew, that's quite a list. New games/releases or specific requests can also be brought in so don't be shy to post a want list.

Okay people, see you at the Vault this weekend!

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Guild of Board Gamers


Since when are we a League?

UPDATE!

Arthas will not be joining us for a while and no Bortacks you do not need to know why.

Ipoh gamers still have problems using e-mail mainly because it is easy to use and completely free.

I will change this...

Friday, September 01, 2006

Weekend Game On The Brink.


It is the first weekend of the month. A very busy time for all of us. It is not a bad thing and it has to be done. We are postponing our gaming sessions until the coming Tuesday. We might still be busy then but we will try our best.

So during this hiatus of games, please, spread the disease and bring the masses to Resident Meeple.