Lords of Vegas

I believe I have been insulted. Do I need to call Al out for a duel?

S.

That's just as well. Al is a younger man and very wiry.

Lords of Vegas is a great little hybrid eurotrash dice roller that should be popular here, and in general. I think Wheatons TV series might have helped it a little bit. It's snappy playing, easy to pick up and play, but has lots of little clever bits that keep it interesting, even if there's a good dose of chance with the cards and dice rolling but in this game it's very well tied to the theme and feel of the game. It's definitely got hints of Acquire in there, not only in the speculation aspect of "shares" (in this case casino company tiles) but also the way these islands of property swell and can merge, plus the dual edged cash/VP nature of the properties (though here, owning stuff gets you both, whereas in Acquire part of the skill is knowing when to generate cash by letting your smaller holdings get swallowed up and when to hang on to VP blocks). And in no way should this game be compared on an equal footing with the genius that is Acquire (which of course should have been the Monopoly we all grew up with).


Some interesting aspects of the rules give rise to some cool interaction, and even if late in the game it can devolve into throwing all your cash in desperate attempts (by all players) to wrest control of the larger/largest casino blocks, that still ties in nicely to the theme and provides fun, family drama. I don't use family as some do, as a negative.

such as:

- The scoring track, which should be more lauded, though to be honest I do not know if someone else already did this (I suppose you could say that in some ways, many games kind of have this without explicitly having it by making late game stuff become increasingly more dominant) - anyway, at the start you get a point every time you score a point - ownership of a casino (the player with the highest die placed within a single coloured block of tiles) gives you a point per tile in that casino every time that casino brand card is drawn. Whats clever is later in the track come "break points" so that soon you can only advance from 8 to 10 by making a full 2 point score. Everything that scores you 1 point is ignored. Later on the jumps go to 3, and then 4 etc. This means that early in the game owning small casinos scores you points but as the game develops you need to expand them to be able to get past those break points. It works really nicely as a semi comeback mechanism to avoid the early leaders running away but forces the game to be creative with expanding your casinos

- the limited number of casino tiles in each colour is very clever and causes much gnashing of teeth later on as they start to disappear and suddenly you're stuck needing 4 point casinos to advance on the score track, only have 3 tile casinos and no spare stock to be able to extend it. This also adds some cute early game tactics of bagging a diverse portfolio of small casinos because that lets you later on remodel those (to other colours) and thus free up the colours you might need to build onto your bigger casinos.

- sprawling which lets you extend your casinos onto spaces you don't "own" (normally you draw a card each turn, it refers to a board location which you then reserve with a marker to be able to build on later) - this lets you extend casinos for payouts but comes with the cost that later on the card with those spots comes up and now the player who drew that location takes over your spot there for free. This has come up several times in my games to amazing drama as a surefire winning points haul is ruined by the "rightful" owner of a key tile popping up at the death

- the mergers when coloured blocks meet. The highest player die is the "boss"of the casino and gets all the points payouts when a card showing that colour casino comes up. In the case of ties rerolls are done until only one is highest "There can be only one", hilariously this sometimes leads to a player not involved in the tiebreaker suddenly becoming boss (thematic explanation: the two warring bosses made such a mess of it all that someone else stepped in and took it over).

- you can also force rerolls of all the dice in the casino which becomes easier later in the game when more money is in the players hands, and coincides with increased need to take control of the key casinos. You can also do cool stuff like build small shit casinos near big powerful ones, and then "remodel" your little one to the same colour and if its adjacent it becomes part of the now even bigger one, you can then be the boss directly if you had a high dice in the old one, or at least force a reroll for ownership.

gambling - you can bet money at any other players casino, basically a double or nothing bet that they can also lay off half to the bank, but cannot refuse the gamble. Can be used to get that extra money needed to build the expensive lots (properties adjacent to the strip for example which payout a few extra times due to the special strip cards and at game end), or can be used to take away money from a player so they can not afford to buy a key spot on their turn

I've not seen a lot of trading but I'm sure in the right group it would definitely increase the tension, and because of the dice rolling and card drawing, it never feels like "kingmaking" in a bad way - of course you can see who needs to be reeled in, but you can't be sure the dice and cards will go your way.


The new expansion adds bits for 5 and 6 players, probably the only downside to the base game is it supports 2-4 only (but play with 4 only), the expansion adds tiles that lift "up" the casinos vertically to make it easier to get more points from the smaller area casinos since with 5 and 6p layers theres less real estate per player, but Id have preferred an extra small board with some new casino spots and have done that for myself with a home build addition.


Really a nice, lightweight, confrontationally fun game with some interesting stuff to think about and try out, but never getting bogged down in calculation dullness because of the dice and cards (basically each colour casino has 9 cards in the deck, and these are laid out by the board so you see in real time which casinos are "due" for payouts - and you can build accordingly but it's no more complex than that. Owning dice in casinos gets you money for each pip but only the highest die - the boss - in each casino gets the point payout (based on casino size) when that colour is drawn from the deck


Easy to homebrew with a deck of regular cards and a hand draw grid of locations, some poker chips and dice. No excuse not to give it a try.

Alright, I'm interested...I didn't pay attention to this one either, as others noted...sounds cool though, and definitely in line with the kinds of games I'm wanting to play lately.

But why is it so rasselfrackin' expensive?! $40 at CSI, of a $45 retail...

Mayfair price fixes their games.

Dang it, they used to just net price the Settlers line...

Does anyone want to sell me one for twenty dollars?