Session Report for Friday 10/7 at Agents

We had a very successful and entertaining gaming session last Friday,
ultimately we ended up with our best showing so far getting 6 people
into one game. But I don't want to get ahead of myself.

Drew and I got there first and gabbed about some upcoming games that
we'd like get then decided to play a quick game of Dvonn, a two
player abstract game. If you haven't heard of Dvonn it's part of the
Gipf Project. If you haven't heard of the Gipf Project I will explain
it right now.

The Gipf project consists of a series of two player completely
abstract games, the games are: Gipf, Tamsk, Zertz, Dvonn, Yinsh, and
the soon to be released Punct (the final game in the series). Each
game can be played and enjoyed completely independently but they can
also be tied together into a big metagame. The master game is Gipf,
when you sit down to play a game of Gipf with someone else you can
choose to play with or without "Potentials". If you play without
Potentials then you are just playing plain old Gipf, which is fine,
reportedly it's a good game I've never played it. But if you choose
to use the Potentials then you're in for a much bigger game.

The way it works is that each game in the series has a corresponding
Potential which can be used to a unique effect in the Gipf game. For
example if I'm playing Gipf and I play the Dvonn Potential then we
have to set aside Gipf for a moment and go play a game of Dvonn. The
winner of the Dvonn game decides what happens to the Potential in the
Gipf game. The original game of Gipf then continues until another
Potential is played which will once again trigger a side journey into
one of the other games.

Personally I only own and have played Dvonn. It's a decent game, I
give it a 7/10 and enjoy playing it once in awhile but I wouldn't
want to play it all the time. I'd love to play more games in the
series and even try a game of Gipf with potentials but that's not
likely to happen. Each game is sold separately and even the Potenials
are sold separately so the Gipf Project is not a cheap hobby. I'm
looking at getting Yinsh because it is supposedly very good but I'll
likely never get the whole set though I must say I find the concept
fascinating.

After Dvonn Scott, Chris, and Kevin (welcome) showed up and we
decided to start with a 5 player game of High Society. The thing I
like about High Society is how much angst it packs into such a simple
short game. It gives you a lot of bang for your buck. I think this is
our third game of High Society the previous two being with 4 players
each. So this time we learned something about the economics of High
Society. Each time you add a player to the game you bring another
$105 into the economy of the game but the amount of "stuff" that's up
for sale doesn't change. More money chasing the same amount of stuff
equals inflation and higher prices. Sure enough, all of the cards
were selling for more than you would expect from our four player
games. The 10 card went for $40 and even the 1 card went for $15.
Unbelievable.

By the way, the converse is also true. When you remove players from
the game the auctions get cheaper. We haven't played High Society
with 3 players yet but when you do you see that money is not the most
important commodity, it's your cards themselves. Since with 3 players
you are likely to win more auctions you are also spending more cards
and are quite likely to run out of cards before the end. You should
almost never spend more than 2 cards per auction in 3 player High
Society. The number of cards you spend is almost more important than
the amount of money.

As we wrapped up High Society another new player, August, joined us.
So now we were six which limits your options significantly. There
aren't too many games that are good with that number so we flirted
with splitting up into two groups of three. Ultimately, though, we
decided on a monster 6 player game of Power Grid. PG is one of my
favorite games. Along with Prince of Florence it is one of the few
games that rewards long term planning (although not as much as PoF).
I was a little leery of playing with 6 especially with 2 of them
being new to the game but it seemed to work out very well. The key to
Power Grid is valuing the Power Plants correctly in the auction
phase. This is very tricky as you must consider variables like turn
order, availability of fuel, and how much money you'll need for
building. Overall I'd say we did a good job making sure plants sold
for what they were worth which is one of the keys to keeping the game
balanced.

Our game featured relatively cheap fuel throughout, which is an
unusual occurrence from what I understand. Often one can expect fuel
supplies to be exhausted entirely. I think our fuel market benefited
from the popularity of the wind plants (which consume no fuel). With
almost every wind plant in play fuel demand went way down. This is
the peril of wind plants since on average they power fewer cities
than a comparably priced coal or oil plant. If everybody has wind
then it's the coal and oil players who benefit. If nobody has wind
then the value of those plants skyrockets.

After Power Grid it was getting late but we decided to press on with
a game of Citadels. Citadels is quite a good role selection game with
the exception of the Assassin role which I hate because it is so
punishing to the assassinee. It's not much fun to watch 5 other
players take their turn twice (or even three times if you're unlucky)
before you get to take a turn. I'm still looking for a good solution
to this role. One idea I had but never tried is for the assassin to
only take away the ability to use your selected character that turn.
In other words if you take the merchant and the merchant is
assassinated then you would not get your extra gold but you could
still take your action and build districts if you wanted. Of course
this variant underpowers the assassin considerably and he may never
even be selected anymore. Not sure what the solution is.

Anyway, I got called home in the middle of this game so I'm not sure
how it ended or if you played any games after that one. Maybe
somebody else can fill us in.

Marshall