April 2 2003 RussCon Report

Game Results

We got to introduce more folks (Allen and Justin) to the wonderful game Blokus. Yay. This really is a brilliant elegant fast abstract strategy game.

Istanbul is Allen and PJ's homebrew game, last played 2001-10-03. This playtest session saw improved spiffy prototype components, but it played slowly (about 2.5 hours; Allen was expecting it to be 1 hour) and we had various rules confusions/ambiguities/uncertainties. Hopefully we gave useful feedback! Having pondered it some more, here's my personal take on Istanbul: I felt too much at the mercy of the cards (including some very powerful special effect cards) and didn't have enough control or ability to make long term plans; I felt I was always just reacting to the immediate situation and cards I was dealt. I enjoy that in a short fast simple game like Guillotine, but it's not good for 2.5 hours. The theme is building monuments in Turkey that may last from ancient times to modern times, through a dozen eras of invaders who often ruin a lot of monuments. I think building things is enjoyable and emotionally satisfying for many players, and it's a good game theme. But the monuments are very fragile as the game stands, and it's hard to build many, and it becomes increasingly cost-ineffective to rebuild them, so instead of satisfaction at a collection of long-standing monuments, you mostly have a frustration as your monuments keep getting destroyed. (Having a much larger number of build chits available in each era could help these issues a lot.) Any monument with colored cards in it seemed very likely to be doomed, so the only clear way to have a chance of an ancient monument surviving till the end (and thus scoring big points) is to build it with white cards, and it's pure luck whether you get any of those early on. And even then you need a special museum card to keep opponents from adding a colored card "improvement" to your monument. Poor Sea Biscuit spent several turns with no monuments at all. There are a lot of special bits of rules chrome that seemed to never come into play, or that didn't seem to add play value in proportion to the additional rules complexity generated. E.g. practically no trading or use of "licenses" (special effect of some monument cards) occurred or taking a card from a neighbor monument. A game it reminds me of is Credo, another historically themed game with a fundamentally appealing theme and core idea and lots of cards, but a variety of weird special (and occasionally unclear) rules and lengthy game play and a feeling of just reacting to the cards you are dealt. (Take all this critique with a grain of salt as Allen and I have different tastes as to the balance of simplicity vs chrome and pure gameplay vs simulation.) Istanbul's basic theme and core gameplay ideas seem sound and interesting to me. Having the final wave of invaders be modern tourists is a cute touch. I personally feel like there could be a simple elegant game struggling to emerge, but that's my bias.

Dropping one advisor in Italien during my last turn earned me 12 points and victory in Web of Power. Woot!