George Kinney
United States
Bellefontaine
Ohio
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Finally, after a 45 day shipping time due to a very lousy ebay seller, and a weeks hectic events at the house, I finally managed to get this game on the table for the first time since I was young.
The first thing to make an impression is that this game comes in a huge box. Easily 6" longer than the other long boxes of the period. For whatever reason, it is packaged with the board on one side, and the pieces in a smaller insert next to it. Oh well, its not like insanely large boxes are uncommon from that era.
First up was me, my son and my youngest daughter. I had never tried this game three player, and considering my youngest opponent is four years old, I don't see this as much of an example of how it 'plays' with three.  At any rate, it was over pretty quickly, the boy liked stacking the pieces and quickly wiped out his sister, while I used several reserve pieces in the end to wrap things up and win.
Usually, my son adds a great deal of randomness to whatever we are playing as he makes his moves for reasons known only to himself, but I was rather surprised to see him moving multiple places on the board during this game. Normally he'll play abstracts by moving just one piece over and over until it can't move, then he'll pick another. So maybe he is moving past that phase (he'll be 5 in two months), or maybe the colorful domes, and the gobbling up of other people's pieces, was just too much fun.
Next game, my daughter and I decided to try it two player, and she took red while I took green. I concentrated on dominating as many of her pieces as possible from the get-go, while she fell into the common beginners problem or trying to build big stacks just for the sake of building big stacks. Or possibly she thought it was an advantage to capture my pieces, I'm not sure.
As we usually do, I let her play her plays for a while, then pointed out what she was missing. Namely, she was losing ground everywhere on the board, and reducing herself to one big, and largely immobile stack. She countered by splitting the stack and trying to capture back some shorter stacks, but by then it was too late. Within a few more moves I won.
We were going to setup for another round, but it was a school night, and bedtime is fixed around here.
The good news is that I enjoy this game as much as I remembered enjoying it long ago, which was a relief, since many of the games I've re-encountered didn't stand up to my memories of them. Also good news is that my daughter (my primary abstract opponent) liked it too so it'll make it to the table again.
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