Meuterer

ladymondegreen hosted Games-Club-in-Exile at her place in New Jersey last night, so hi ho, on the PATH train we go! Um, went. Jon was there, of course, but the only other folks who showed up were Aaron and myself. We spent a lot of the time just chatting and listening to CDs. Aaron mentioned some of the bizarre emulations (like a binary calculator) people have built using Marathon, and that someone had designed a pattern in Conway’s Life that emulates a Life cell, implying (though not proving) that Conway’s Life is Turning-complete.

We eventually got around to playing a game — Meuterer, the game I’ve been wanting to try for like a year now, from the designer of Verräter, and I discovered that I like Verräter better. I can see why the differences are there. Meuterer has an additional way to score each turn, with a commodity selling mechanic, so even if you’re not in a position to win big points in the turn’s battle, you might still be able to score points by selling stuff, but it’s just too indirect. Verräter seems like a purer implementation of its core idea. Also, if one player manages to seize a high score in both the battle and the commodity selling (as Jon did at one point) then he gets a lead that’s really hard to beat.

On the other hand, I really liked the way Meuterer balances the ability to play commodity cards against the ability to pick an action card. Each player gets to play one commodity in turn. On your turn, you can choose to refrain from playing a commodity, and pick an action card instead, but then you can no longer play commodities; that’s the last thing you get to do till everyone (but the captain) has picked an action card, and actions are revealed.

We just played that one game, and then Aaron and I left. I got home around 3 AM.