Help me decide: Angola or AA

scissors wrote: thx for the help - Schweig! - the consensus seems to be that angola takes 8 hrs. these days that is a very long game for me

8 hours!? Only with a serious amount of trash talking would it take that long. I'd say it runs more along the lines of 5 hours.

By the way, Angola was a Portuguese colony, so no need for English colonial guilt.

i know that. Its not a logical issue. Its a, what your going to play a game about an issue we are all wired to be sensitive about thing.

I can't imagine planning for less than 8 hours for Angola for the first game myself. Don't forget dinner/lunch too, and walking the dog, so maybe 9 hours is better.

Schweig! wrote:

scissors wrote: thx for the help - Schweig! - the consensus seems to be that angola takes 8 hrs. these days that is a very long game for me

8 hours!? Only with a serious amount of trash talking would it take that long. I'd say it runs more along the lines of 5 hours.

By the way, Angola was a Portuguese colony, so no need for English colonial guilt.

We routinely finish in under five hours ( and thats if the game goes the full ten turns ) . We played a game that we called via sudden death midway through the seventh turn at PrezCon that took 3.5 hours . I'd shoot myself if a game went nine hours .

I do agree that the first game will take longer. But the same holds true for Andean Abyss . In fact I think AA tends to be much slower the first time around - it has somewhat unusual mechanics, on top of a non conventional situation - once you figure out HOW to do stuff, then you have to figure out WHAT to do. While Angola is somewhat unusual at first glance, it makes sense pretty quickly after awhile . A group that feels the need to budget nine hours for Angola will similarly crawl through the first game of Andean Abyss, guaranteed.

AA does have the plus of flexibility in terms of number of players . Angola is strictly a four player game . I suppose you could play two player, but there are tons of other options.

Overall I like Angola a lot better. I've probably logged ten plays since the game came out less than a year ago, whereas AA I've played maybe half that.

One plus for Andean Abyss is that once you learn the system, the games in the pipeline ( Afghanistan, Cuba, and Vietnam ) will be much easier to learn .

I guess this means my group needs to play Angola again asap to settle this issue We've only played once. I would love it if we could fit it into a long evening.

MattDP wrote: Neither. I'm waiting on Cuba Libre and the Successors reprint.

Successors III is one of my favorite games of all time. Good choice.

As for the other 2, I've played some AA solo and am in the middle of my first Angola game PBEM now. I have a hard time not putting Angola over AA for all the reasons already mentioned (particularly KingPut's warning about what happens if/when it goes OOP). I also don't see how it could possibly take 2 hrs./player to complete a game of Angola unless you've got nothing but 18xx gamer-types who must analyze every move 18 different ways before committing to a move. After that first learning game or two where everyone is internalizing the fairly unique elements of the game, it strikes me as a fairly zippy wargame in terms of pace. There just aren't that many actions available to each player in a given turn.

Dogmatix wrote: I also don't see how it could possibly take 2 hrs./player to complete a game of Angola unless you've got nothing but 18xx gamer-types who must analyze every move 18 different ways before committing to a move.

Too funny, one of the slowest guys I know ( upthread I mention his penchant for routinely taking 5 hours to play Hannibal) is a die hard train gamer.

Successors III rocks.