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Here's the low-down-and-filthy on my EuroQuest 2008 experience. I went Thursday through Sunday, but Sunday was reserved for an all-day games blowout with the kids. I'm not a tournament player. I attend EQ for open gaming with the AT crew and whoever else I can suffer with my presence.
Convention lowlights: Hotel renovations, being pressganged into a tournament game of Settlers of Catan (ended up being a highlight, see below), my mayo-ladened Chili's burger.
Convention highlights: surrounding and destroying two of Prussia's generals in a sweet game of Friedrich (even though I lost), pulling out an insanely close win in Manoeuvre, scoring $6700 in a single turn in a game of Monopoly Express, losing Red November on the last turn due to reactor meltdown, hanging out with the kids, watching Josh swoop in on Bill in Shadowlord! on the third turn and initiate a master-on-master fight (the result: Josh loses his master and knocks himself out of the game when Bill masterfully plays his "10" card), talking tremendous smack during our raucous pseudo tournament game of Catan – including a brilliant moment where Ben uses a monopoly card to snatch 10 wood cards from my hands, only seconds after I openly mocked everyone by stating that the wood would win me the game next turn.
The following games were new to me, and are rated on a 1-10 scale as well as ranked from best to worst. The dotted line separates the games into "would play again" and "would not play again" categories. Games with an asterisk are from my EQ kid-fest.
Smarmy yet insightful comments follow the list.
New games played:
Shadowlord! 7.5 (possibly an 8)
We Didn't Playtest This At All 7.5
Red November 7
Conflict of Heroes 6.5 (will likely go up)
Snow Tails 6.5
Ghost Stories 6.5
Sorry Sliders 6 (*)
A Touch of Evil 6 (5.5? - could go up or down)
Pirates of the High Seas 6 (*)
Martinique (prototype) 6 (*)
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Traders of Carthage 4.5
Keltis (Lost Cities: The Board Game) 4
Other games played: Doom, Manoeuvre, Tinners' Trail, Friedrich, Age of Steam: Northern England (homebrew map), After the Flood, Risk Express, Can't Stop, Ticket to Ride: Europe, Age of Steam: Connecticut Corridor (homebrew map), Acquire, Metro, Settlers of Catan, Pandemic (*), Cluzzle (*), Aunt Millie’s Millions (*), Monopoly Express (*), Battleship Express (*), Cloud 9 (*), Poison (*).
Games that I was hoping to play, but it just didn’t happen: Space Alert, Napoleon's Triumph, Age of Steam: Vermont/New Hampshire, Age of Steam: Disco Inferno/Soul Train, Age of Steam: Secret Blueprints of Steam, Lord of the Rings w/ Sauron expansion, Steel Driver, Cutthroat Caverns, Dos Rios, Iliad, Condottiere.
Games where I upgraded my rating after playing again: Monopoly Express, Battleship Express, Risk Express.
***rude and pithy comments***
We Didn't Playtest This At All
A randy (random/wacky) game with an average playtime of 30 seconds. Totally up my alley. My original rating was a 6, but then I briefly considered giving it a 10. It gets a 7.5 for now, but its rating may rise. I will likely get a copy. People who rate this game a 5 or less are fun-resistant, lacking in smiles, and deserving of severe spinal and/or spousal abuse.
Red November
A cooperative game that belongs in my collection because of its much-appreciated sense of humor (frantic gnome activity, alcohol-driven periods of unconsciousness, the dreaded kraken, etc.) - some of which is related to the possibility of cruel and unusual player elimination.
Players can be eliminated in other cooperative games (Shadows over Camelot, Lord of the Rings, Ghost Stories), but it's a rare occurrence - and when it does happen it usually occurs near the end of the game. Here, the possibility of dying is much more in-your face, which ratchets up the tension and hilarity quite a bit. (Pass out in a high-flood chamber or a compartment that's on fire? Too bad! You're dead!) If you spend the full amount of time on a task (Thebes-style) and use up your equipment chits, death can be avoided. But who wants to do that? Instead, you can play the odds and hope to roll well. If that doesn't happen, the result is an untimely demise and well-deserved laughter and mockery.
Yes, there are tons of die rolls - which might normally be over-the-top - but in this case the die-driven chaos is perfectly at home in a game as silly as this one. Some of the mechanics are cool, too, in that flooded chambers can be opened to put out fires in neighboring compartments. I look forward to playing this again.
Conflict of Heroes
More complicated than I thought it would be, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. By the end of my first (and only) game, I had a pretty good handle on the beginner rules. My rating will probably go up after I play with the cards and advanced rules. (The introductory scenario omits cardplay for the sake of simplicity.) All in all, I thought that the action point/response mechanics were pretty cool, and I look forward to banging out more games of CoH in the near future.
Shadowlord!
This is a tremendous game, and worth twenty times the $5 that I paid for my copy. (Note: Jealousy will get you nowhere.)
For a Parker Brothers mass-market game, there's a surprising amount of detail and complexity in Shadowlord! (Proof? The rulebook has an index, and the game comes with player reference cards.) However, this game of space conquest and elimination isn't particularly mind-boggling, although its level of wackiness and fun is quite severe.
A key point of gameplay is that once your Elemental Master has been wiped out, you're out of the game - and that can literally happen on turn 2 if you're not aware of the "intricacies" of the rules and gameplay. For instance, if you put your Master in a vulnerable position, there is a distinct possibility that Invincible Darkness can sweep in unopposed, exert his shadow dominance, and take you down. (Yes, that can really happen. And as you might suspect, it's insanely funny when it does.)
Combat is nutty, too, in that the strength of each side is enhanced with a random card draw. For me, though, that just makes the gaming experience that much more hilarious.
There are a number of innovations in Shadowlord!, especially for its time. These include a countdown timer that can cause everyone to lose, character-stealing, and chained movement. And don't forget the pornographic stack of captives that grows increasingly larger with each battle. Too funny.
Finally, let's be honest. Half the fun of playing is being able to scream "Shadowlord!" whenever passers-by stop and ask the name of the game. God loves an exclamation point.
(Played again since the convention. Rating went up! This game is amazing.)
Snow Tails
A clever card-driven racing game where frenzied dogs pull your sled onwards and upwards – often into a tree or wall. The fact that players are forced to play one or more card each turn (to modify the sled brakes and strength of each dog) means that players are sometimes in a position where wall- and tree-smackery is unavoidable. But that just makes the game even more sadistic and enjoyable.
Ghost Stories
I was initially lukewarm about Ghost Stories. Contrary to the buzz, there's very little that's innovative about the game. (Keep in mind that this is coming from someone with an unnatural appreciation for cooperative gaming. In fact, I'm such an admirer of cooperative games that I make a point to use the term "cooperative sex" rather than "group sex" whenever the topic happens to arise in everyday conversation.)
In terms of GS's qualities of "sameness", the game includes unique player abilities, a constant barrage of danger and dread, a focus on killing an evil overlord, and so forth. These same elements can be found (piecemeal) in Pandemic, Shadows over Camelot, Lord of the Rings, Vanished Planet, and Arkham Horror.
However, the theme in GS is neat, the game art is downright purty, and GS does contribute a small handful of "newness" to the cooperative game field: location-based special actions, dice-driven combat mitigated by power chits, and oddly-named minions of evil. So, at the moment, I would be willing and interested in playing the game at least a few more times.
As noted elsewhere, though, all information in GS is completely open, which means that there’s a real possibility that a single experienced player can dominate the entire proceedings, which would be entirely unfun.
Finally, GS has proven that the Eurogaming community is willing to put up with an inordinate amount of die-rolling, as long as there are no actual numbers on the dice. Colors and symbols on die faces are OK, I guess, but standard dice apparently leave a wargame/Ameritrash aftertaste. Fair enough. I’ve now learned a lesson about game marketability and design.
Sorry Sliders
A shuffleboard-type game that is only marginally related to the Sorry theme. The kids liked it. If I can find this for $10 at a blowout sale, I’m definitely picking one up - especially since it comes with multiple board set-ups. It may be redundant to own both this and Rebound, however.
A Touch of Evil
I understand that our game was, unfortunately, not representative of a typical game. There were very few minions on the board until game's end, which is downright odd since that's the primary source of tension in the game. As it was, we took turns reading campy flavor text to one another and rolling lots of dice. The number of die rolls may have been equal to the number of rolls in Red November, but the amount of rolling in ToE just comes across as endless and unnecessary – especially since ToE is a much longer game.
Pirates of the High Seas
Oversized, cannon-shooting fun that takes up a mammoth spread of table space.
Traders of Carthage
The cards available on each player's turn distinctly overpower whatever long- or short-term strategy might be present in the game. No need to play this again.
Keltis (Lost Cities: The Boardgame)
As someone who enjoys Lost Cities, I was surprised to find how much I disliked the multiplayer version of the game. Nearly all of the changes to the original game are misguided. In particular, the chits/rewards that are placed on the various expedition paths reward the players who happen to draw the expedition "suits" for those paths. Turn order, too, becomes important, since being able to draw discarded cards is now turn-order dependent.
One positive change is that expeditions can go either low-to-high or high-to-low, which is critically important here due to the fact that players need to advance up the tracks quickly to be even vaguely competitive. (This wouldn't work in the 2-player version, but it is necessary here.) Regardless, unlike the original version, luck (rather than skill) is now the one and only factor that determines who happens to win.
After the Flood
I was tempted to rate this game a 7, but it didn't seem fair to rate the game after playing a single turn from a 5-turn game. I can say that the game is rather involved, in a good way, and that players' "ideal" strategies and decisions are not immediately obvious. There's a reasonable amount of player conflict, too, which is entertaining.
Whether the game holds up for a full 5 turns (3-4 hours?) - and whether it holds up to repeat plays - is something that I don't know. Aside from combat die rolls, for example, there is absolutely no randomness in AoF - which means that much of the uncertainty in the game is due to unexpected player decisions rather that outside forces. And if a "preferred" strategy/path to victory is discovered, even that uncertainty may dry up. It's also not clear how often I'd be able to get AoF on the table even if I owned it, since it's only meant to be played with three players. It was pretty cool, though.
WRAPPING IT UP
In summary, it's important to state that I was at EuroQuest and you weren't - but you should have been. In the future, don't let the "Euro" label scare you away. F:AT has a strong presence, and open gaming at EQ is always a blast.
