Games Club, from Friday

[avram]

Oh yeah, there was Games Club on Friday. Um, what’d we play? Oh yeah....

I came in as mnemex was explaining how to play Power Grid, and I stepped in for kent_allard_jr, who didn’t feel like playing. Did really badly. It’s got some very clever mechanical bits, but it’s excessively thinky — it rewards spending lots of time figuring out exactly how your next several game actions are going to go so you can optimize your current one. Probably worth taking a look at if you’re a game design geek.

We also played Money, a very simple currency trading game with cover art that makes it look much zanier than it actually is. The scoring is a bit complicated, but once you get how it works, the game play is pretty simple. I feared that the auctions would take forever, but they mostly went pretty quickly. You’ve got a bunch of money cards in different currencies (two more currencies than the number of players); you’re trying to specialize. Each round you engage in successive auctions, bidding money to get money. The winner of each auction gets to swap the cards he was bidding for either one of the two sheaves of four cards dealt off the deck, or for someone else’s bid. When the deck runs out, the round is over and you score.

And we played San Juan. I managed to build three bonus buildings for the first time (Guild Hall, City Hall, and Palace), for 45 points, which may be my highest score.

Comments

[acrobatty.livejournal.com]

The Money game sounds pretty interesting. I wonder if it would help an econ-dunce like me understand financial equivalencies better. I don't understand why specializing in one currency is the goal -- is that in any way modeled on real-world currency trading, or is it just an arbitrary telos for play?

[avram]

Nah, it’s pretty artificial, and doesn’t have much to do with real-world money trading.

Money

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Money is one of my less-favorite Knizia games, in part because he made no effort to "link" the three rounds. You play a hand, write down the scores, and play another hand. For some reason, I wanted something like the commodites market in Medici, where how you play in the first round influences how you play in the second and third rounds. This was probably an unfair expectation, but I still felt like there was something missing.