Bruce Murphy
Australia
Pyrmont
NSW
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I'd had this game in mind for quite a while and picked up a copy recently. I'd been impressed with a couple of Colvini games (Clans and Cartagena) and thought that the mechanic of building up collections of cities to best match your variable and evolving scoring opportunities through cards was fantastic. This was a 4-player game with all new players. I had watched Scott's video and had a pretty good idea of how the game worked, though!
The rules explanation was fairly straightforward. I helpfully had German and English rules available, but the game turns are (typically for Colvini) very straightforward. The icons on all the different scoring cards were another matter, and I had to go over the currently complete city vs all-green difference a couple of times. Even the optional wall removing didn't present as much a problem.
If you're teaching the game to new players, it's probably worth going over the coast definition, pointing out the region boundaries for the three shield cards, and explaining that walls and towers part of any complete city are the only ones that don't count in the game. The other confusing part is the exact requirement on the 1/2/3 triangle cities, vs the 7+ triangle scoring card.
In the early game, everyone was shy of triggering any score conditions, and some quite large sections were playing out. In particular, a very large selection of black towers was left in part of a huge wall, and when a tiny 1-triangle city was scored, C and B both leapt ahead by both having the scoring card worth a massive 18 points from all the black towers not part of any complete city. This effectively split the game into C and B competing out front while E and M fought for third and forth place.
It was only at that point that the importance of not creating any large structures that could potentially give overwhelming scores to another player became clearer. This isn't a low-interaction game, you have to be aware of the opportunities you're creating for others as well. E and M, caught off-guard ended up playing single 3-5 point scoring cards, which were probably less useful than forgoing a scoring round and getting two more cards.
One thing we missed during all the merging of smaller cities into the Mega City Of Doom in the middle of the board was removing isolated internal towers after the walls were removed in a merger. This didn't affect the game too much as the single black tower recovered was immediately placed again anyway.
After the scoring opportunities in such a huge city became obvious, scores swung back and forth several times as people took advantage of merging in new smaller cities to re-score with all the included houses and palaces. This made cards dealing with free towers and total cities particularly worthless and most players just immediately discarded them. B kept hold of one coastal tower one to remind himself how many points it was worth at the start of the game.
Everyone started choosing their wall positions better to ensure house colours were placed usefully for scoring in a round two, and the city block grew a little more, but the average number of total cities was kept around 3 or 4 almost the whole game because of the opportunities to merge with the larger city.
The score cards did start to balance out in the mid-game. M and E managed to make up a lot of ground and several small cities were created simply to get more cards into hands. They managed to narrow the lead significantly by the end game, once they'd gotten a better idea of the likely future values of the cards. I think the megacity probably warped several of the values during the game.
I reminded people a couple of time of the end-game conditions - exhaustion of any type of piece (regardless of colour) and it mostly sunk in. IN particular, near the end I pointed out that only 3 palaces remained in the supply. Over the next couple of turns I managed to create one green palace and one pink house in the mega city, then it was easy to merge in the final pink house,
This was actually a risk taken at the end of the game. B was competing mostly with C who had just exhausted much of her hand in leapfrogging to the leading position. B managed to have 15 points of score from the final city while C having only 7 was left trailing by a few points. Controlling the game end is important!
Final scores were: B:97, C:94, M:82, E:75
It's practically a hallmark of Colvini games that you discover a lot more depth to them during your first play. The rules seem relatively simple, combining a handful of possible actions, but the decoupling of your actions and from directly affecting just your own score/game leads to all sorts of interesting effects. I'd now heartily recommend giving his games an actual play before dismissing them as uninteresting from just a rules read. Masons is a great game at about the same weight of China.
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Tomello Visello
United States
Reston
Virginia
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thepackrat wrote: In the early game, everyone was shy of triggering any score conditions, My experience in teaching newcomers is that they get too eager for a city at the start (in order to see how it works) instead of waiting for some more open-space value to be placed.
thepackrat wrote: C and B both leapt ahead by both having the scoring card worth a massive 18 points from all the black towers not part of any complete city. ...It was only at that point that the importance of not creating any large structures that could potentially give overwhelming scores to another player became clearer. Similarly, they may come to learn that the single, multi-merged city in the middle is dangerous, also.
thepackrat wrote: I think the megacity probably warped several of the values during the game. See ?
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Bruce Murphy
Australia
Pyrmont
NSW
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I agree, the single huge city made the potential score swings pretty wild, but this was somewhat compensated by the way that there were so many potential things to score in it.
B>
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