Let's do it again, when it's cooler

[avram]

The Games Club folks have just left. We had mnemex, Dvd, Beth, and Mark (who may not count since he’s staying over anyway). We played Citadels, a pretty cool role-taking game (these are games like Verräter, or Meuterer or Puerto Rico, where there are a bunch of roles that determine what a player can do, and each player chooses a role each round) that supports from two to eight players. I think it’s the simplest of the role-taking games I’ve seen so far, and may server as a good introduction to the mechanic. It’s also fun. I’m looking forward to playing with the variant roles.

We also played a five-hand game of Too Many Cooks, which I might have won if I hadn’t made a stupid move in the fourth round due to forgetting that Mnemex and I were going for the same goal. I actually managed to pull off a successful No Soup For You round even with akawil sitting to my right going for the same goal. I think this is my third or fourth time playing Too Many Cooks, and I keep liking it.

Comments

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I strongly recommend playing with the Witch instead of the Assassin as role #1 in Citadels. The first time I played Citadels was with the original German version which had only the eight basic characters, and I spend around half the game completely unable to take an action because of poorly targeted assassinations. At least when the Witch strikes, you still get to take your normal turn.

Some of my gaming community have decided that Too Many Cooks is trivial, but I think they're wrong. I like it a lot.

Oh, and I won a game of Puerto Rico last night. I think this is the first time I've ever won.

[avram]

Josh figured that for our first game (he was the only one who’d played before) we should play with the original characters (plus the Artist), but afterwards we more or less agreed that next time we should use the Witch.

[mneme]

Have to agree that Witch is much more balanced than Assassin -- Assassin is just to strong (or, really, being assassinated is just too harsh, while the witch is gentler, with the extra plus/minus of getting someone's role actions and the risk of losing your build (if you bewitch an untaken character)), though I think this changes a lot in a larger game.

OTOH, at least in theory, the Assassin's harshness is intended as a balancing factor to prevent the King from taking good money-making roles every turn without payback; this does mean the King can take the Assassin every turn to avoid being assassinated, but the King also has the least well targetted assassination in the game.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

The Assassin works moderately well if it is well-targeted. It completely sucks for everyone if the Assassin guesses wrong about what role his intended target takes. (Well, it doesn't suck for the intended target; in fact, it's a huge benefit.) This happens, of course, a lot--the Assassin wastes his power, the accidental target gets completely screwed for a turn, and the intended target gets away clean.