It's almost a week since I returned from this year's Gathering of Friends, and I'm only just recovering from my self-imposed sleep deprivation. And I wouldn't have it any other way.
The Gathering of Friends is Alan Moon's annual invitation-only get-together in Hartford, CT. If you were a subscriber to The Game Report as of about 15 months ago, when I gave Alan my mailing list, you probably got an invitation in the mail. If you threw it in the trash, you missed out on the premier gaming event of the year. If you're not kicking yourself already, you will be by the time I'm through with you.
Eighty nine people attended this year's event (up about 20% from last year), a five day affair running from Wednesday, May 3, through Sunday, May 7. Apparently a healthy number of earlybirds showed up on Tuesday night, many of the lucky bastards walking off with the best of Ray Pfeiffer's stock of the new games from Nuremburg. By the time I got there early Wednesday morning, most of the new games had already been snapped up by eager buyers.
All the action took place in one large ballroom. Three columns of long tables filled the center of the room, providing ample playing space throughout the long weekend. Tables also lined the perimeter of the room. By Friday, every one of them was piled high with games brought by attendees. Even more games were stuffed in bags and boxes beneath the tables. The character of the Gathering is well illustrated by the fact there must have tens of thousands of dollars worth of games in that room, and nobody gave a moment's thought to leaving their personal stash unattended. Most people at the Gathering knew each other (or did by the time the event concluded), from previous Gatherings, other conventions, or merely through Internet, and everyone respected everyone else's property (in fact, that very respect would come to haunt me later in the weekend— but I get ahead of myself). If you saw a game sitting on a table and you wanted to play, no problem— that's what the game was there for. Most people extended the courtesy of asking the owner for permission before playing, but there was a tacit understanding that if the owner wasn't around, anyone could feel free to use the game as long as it was treated with care and returned in the same condition as it was found. These games were left in the ballroom overnight, too— there was no need to schlep them back to your hotel room. In short, a gamer's paradise.
Each year Alan (the prez of White Wind games and creator of Airlines, Santa Fe, Elfenroads, and others) runs the Gathering moderately democratically. A couple of months before the event he mails out a ballot, giving everyone a chance to vote for the games they'd like to see run as tournaments. The games with the most votes get put on the official schedule. This year, the scheduled tournaments included Santa Fe, Elfenroads, Can't Stop, Wildlife Adventure, Liar's Dice, Homas Tour, Formel 1, Adel Verpflichtet, Hearts/Oh Hell, Modern Art, Auf Heller & Pfennig, and Six Day Race. But that only tells part of the story. If you don't want to participate in the current tournament (or if you get knocked out), you'll find yourself in the middle of a room filled with hundreds of games and a few dozen people more than willing to play them. I repeat, a gamer's paradise.
I started off the weekend by jumping into a lightweight new game called See You Later in which a bunch of colored alligators occupy a small circular track. You flip a card on your turn, moving the indicated gator a certain number of spaces and putting the card in a pile. If that gator lands on an empty space, you can choose to go again or stop. When you stop, you scoop up the pile and move your scoring marker one space for every card in the pile, ending your turn. But if you move a gator onto an occupied space— see you later! Your turn ends and the pile passes to the next player. Players also get a couple of special cards at the start of the game which they may use judiciously to affect gameplay. The overall effect feels like an even more random Can't Stop. And at $30, I passed.
Actually, I bailed. Ray Pfeiffer walked into the room in midgame and was immediately accosted by folks seeking to buy some of the new games just released at the Nuremburg Toy Fair. Knowing that Ray's stock was limited and noting that quite a few people seemed to be asking for one or two games, I said "See you later!" and followed Ray to his room. My timing turned out to be impeccable, as I managed to snag the last copy of both Die Siedler von Catan and Medici, the best of the new games.
Die Siedler von Catan (The Settlers of Catan) was, hands-down, the most popular game of the Gathering. Ray sold out of about 15 copies by noon on Wednesday. I snagged mine sight-unseen, purely because everyone else seemed to be snapping them up. I know a hint when I see one. At least two copies of the game were in constant use throughout the weekend, and I think it's safe to say that, excluding tournaments, it was played more often than any other two games combined. The game involves establishing settlements on a randomly-generated island and trading resources with other players to expand your settlement. A full review appears elsewhere in this issue.
Medici, also reviewed this issue, is a nifty game from Reiner "I crank out great games in my sleep" Knizia. Although there weren't many copies of this available at the Gathering, the few which were seemed to get a decent amount of play.
The first tournament of the weekend was Santa Fe, Alan's game of communal railroad expansion. As I did last year, I made it to the final round. As I did last year, I placed second in the final. And I lost to the same guy I lost to last year. I only made it to the final in one other tournament this year— the Die Siedler von Catan tourney organized by popular demand. I'm sure you've guessed where I'm going with this. I didn't win that tournament, either— the same guy beat me. I've since put a price on his head, so perhaps I'll win something next year. Watch your back, Kiri.
I got a chance to try three of the four new games offered by Gold Sieber,
a new game company which seems to be staking out a reputation for itself
as a purveyor of attractive games with nice bits. Unfortunately, the
quality of the games themselves was spotty. I only took home one of them,
Sternen Himmel. This game
involves placing markers on stars in constellations. Markers, which carry point values, black holes, or double stars, are placed face up or face down depending on where they're put. When all stars of a constellation are covered, that constellation is scored. Any marker directly connected to a black hole is removed. Markers adjacent to a double star count double, while others count their face value. The top two players in the constellation get points, but the top player also has to pay out points to the runners-up— so sometimes it's better to be second than first.
Linie 1 was a real disappointment. This game about street trolleys is split into two phases. In the first and more successful phase, players lay track to connect their two trolley terminals to the three locations they need to stop at along their route. This is accomplished by laying track tiles on a grid. Tracks may be upgraded ala the 18xx games, as long as existing routes are preserved. Everyone has only five tiles to choose from at any one time, so luck plays a role at this stage, but it can be minimized through strategic placement. Once someone connects their route, they enter the second phase— the race. This consists of simply rolling a die and moving your trolley along the track. The first player to complete his route is the winner. Where the first phase of Linie 1 involves forethought, negotiation, and strategy, the second phase is entirely based on luck with absolutely no choices to be made. That's a real shame, because the first phase is a lot of fun. And without the second phase, aspects of the first phase are lost— so you can't really just ignore the second phase. If someone comes up with an alternate system for the second phase of this game, I'd really like to hear about it.
The other Gold Sieber effort I sampled was Galopp Royal, Klaus Teuber's homage to the venerable sport of sedan chair racing(!). Players bid to acquire a team of four bearers in a clever auction in which you don't know the abilities of all the team members on whom you're bidding. Each bearer has a positive or negative rating. On your turn, you roll a four-sided die and move a number of spaces equal to the rating of the corresponding bearer. The first finishers get paid, and in an interesting twist the last finisher gets to ditch his worst bearer and axe one the bearer of his choice from each of his opponents. This effectively lets the loser improve while dragging the leaders down. Before each race there are auctions to allow players who are dissatisfied with their team to acquire a new one, and then a new race begins, each slightly longer and more valuable than the last. The player with the most cast after the last race wins. My problem with this one stems from the increasing payoffs of the races, which are disparate enough to render the initial races pointless. Having a good team going into the last two races practically guarantees big payoffs and a victory. The payoff scale needs to be adjusted to balance out the game. This seems much easier to fix than Linie 1, but I still passed on it for now.
Tim Trant was kind enough to marshal a game of Formula De for a bunch of us. I'd heard a lot about Formula De (most of it— surprise!— from Tim), but had never played before now. Race games aren't too popular in our group (although I finally got a copy of Daytona 500 at the Gathering (thanks Doug!) and it became an immediate hit back home), and this particular one is on the expensive side. Especially when you consider that if you really like the game, you're going to wind up buying additional tracks, which add up fast. The tracks are sturdy, attractive, and large, giving the game an epic feel. Tim produced a case full of lovingly painted miniature cars, adding to the ambiance. The rule system is flexible, and of course Tim has tinkered with it quite a bit, so keep in mind I'm not sure how much of what I played was "true" Formula De.
Each player raced a pair of cars, all of which were identical in terms of capability and equipment. A turn consists of rolling dice, consulting a chart for your current gear to determine how many spaces you move, and then moving. After everyone has moved, you announce whether or not you're shifting into another gear (the higher the gear, the faster you move), and the next round begins.
The tricky thing about Formula De is that each turn has a number associated with it, representing the number of rounds you must end with your car in that turn. If you roll too high and would leave the turn early, you have use your brakes, tires, etc. to compensate. Each system of your car has a limited number of points to spend on such things. If you need to spend one and there aren't any more, your car explodes. Not fun.
You can also spin out, crash into other cars, make a pit stop, etc. Our game took about two hours to run two laps, and even with six players racing it moved along quickly (thanks to Tim's marshalling) and was a blast. I'm now seriously tempted to pick up a copy, even though I remain dubious about its chances of getting played very much around here.
Last year, on the spur of the moment, some of us decided to play Poker in the wee hours. With all the games around, none of them had anything really suitable as chips, so we wound up using paper money from one of them instead. Don't try this at home. There's something very satisfying about tossing chips onto the table, and something very not satisfying about watching paper flutter. It felt like we were playing at playing poker. This year, we came prepared with poker chips. A number of people got into the act, and I was happy to walk away with a lot of their money. If you want to try your luck next year, be forewarned: we play a lot of odd games which purists frown upon. All of them, plus a bunch more, are up on my poker web page at http://www.wolfenet.com/~peter/poker.html.
If you look on the box of 6 Nimmt, you'll see that it's a game for 2-10 players. We wondered. So a group of us satisfied our curiosity and put together a ten player game. Definitely not recommended for the faint of heart. 6 Nimmt is hardly a game of high strategy, and is pretty random to begin with. With ten players it is complete chaos. And a laugh riot. I'm sure we had such a blast precisely because we all knew there was no way we could take the game seriously with ten players, so we got goofy and ridiculous. At one point I was doing so poorly that I decided to start playing my cards entirely at random— the "thousand monkeys with typewriters" approach— and the monkeys actually did better than I did.
In my Board and Party Games class, I always reserve the last class for the same game. It's my all-time favorite party game and has been the most popular game in my classes. It has the advantage of not requiring special equipment to play. It's called Celebrities, and I taught it to a bunch of people at the Gathering late one night. It was a huge hit, particularly with Mike Schloth. For those of you who don't know him, Mike's a big bear of a guy with a deep bass voice and an even deeper guffaw, and by far the most entertaining Celebrities player I've ever seen. The game involves giving clues to teammates to guess famous names. Mike was hilarious, launching into animated audio/visual clues like a giant muppet suddenly freed from a handler's restraints. He had the entire group in stitches (except for Bill Cleary, his long-suffering teammate). Whenever it was their turn it was like watching an Abbott and Costello movie. People liked the game so much that they played it again the following night— unusual for a party game at a gathering of serious gamers. Watch for a description of Celebrities in a future issue.
I've recommended Sid Sackson's A Gamut of Games in these pages before. One of the games described in that book is Haggle, in which players trade cards and information trying to maximize their score. Brandon Brylawski ran a version of this game at the Gathering. Players assumed the roles of traders in an intergalactic economy. Each player began with identical sets of commodities— Voort Gas, Impervium, Designer Genes, etc. These commoditiies were each worth a certain number of points, but we weren't told how much.
Everyone also got three numbered bits of information. There were multiple copies of each number in circulation, and each player started with a different set of three. Even more valuable in the early stages of the game than the commodities themselves, these bits of intelligence revealed the secrets of how players could earn points. Some of them revealed the basic value of goods— things like, "Each container of Voort Gas is worth 2 points" and "Living Crystals are worth twice as much as Voort Gas, but half as much as Impervium." Others provided less revealing but far more intriguing information, like, "Impervium is radioactive" or "Telepathic organisms are vulnerable to radiation." Still others revealed secrets to scoring bonuses, like "Whoever turns in the most Designer Genes earns a bonus equal to the number of Genes squared."
After receiving initial instructions, players had two hours to trade with each other. Trading could take whatever form players wished— commodities for commodities, commodities for information, information for information, etc. Players got clever and started offering meta-information, such as, "If you give me a Minareth Tree, I'll tell you who has Rule #9." Players quicky realized that information was vital, and so much of the first two thirds of the game was spent acquiring intelligence. Some people started spreading false rumors, leading to people demanding to see the actual slips of paper with the info on it during a trade. Most people just exchanged info, keeping their actual slips of paper. As it turned out, a few slips were physically important— acquiring all of these assembled a device worth bonus points.
When time expired, players had to choose which commodities to turn in to be scored. This was crucial, because some things affected others and the number of things turned in could affect your score. For example, every three radioactive items a player submitted made one of their Living Crystals glow, quadrupling its value. But if anyone submitted five or more radioactive items, they reached critical mass and radiated everyone else's best three items.
The final reckoning was amusing. I was at the bottom of the barrel with 0 points, misinterpreting a bit of information which cost me dearly. The game was large— over 30 players, I believe— and it was a rousing success. A tip o' the hat to Brandon for running it.
The other unusual event was a treasure hunt run by Bill Cleary and Ray Pfeifer. Teams of up to five people raced to solve puzzles to yield clues to the location of a treasure, which they then had to find. My team, the powerhouses of which were Brandon and Games Magazine editor Mark Danna, got off to a commanding early lead. The puzzles in this thing were tough— all the more so because they didn't come with instructions (that was part of the puzzle). For example:
PLANE RAIN MAIL CHAIN
PURE PAINS LAITY ENEMY
- - - - - - - - -
That's it. We had to figure out that each word could be anagrammed into the name of a country. The answer to the puzzle, then, is COUNTRIES, which fits in the blanks provided. Many of the puzzles were game-related, and a knowledge of German games— my greatest contribution to the team— was crucial to success.
Bill and Ray recognized that we'd need hints, so they built in a help system in the form of a scavenger hunt. For each of twenty items a team found, they got a point. Points could be spent to buy clues to a puzzle. The more revealing the clue, the more points it cost.
The key to the whole shebang lay in one of the puzzles, which was simply a grid with one square in each row marked by an asterisk, and clues running down the side. The clues all matched one of the answers to the other puzzles (NORWAY, SWEDEN, & DENMARK, for example, matched up to COUNTRIES). The asterisks indicated where the first letter of each answer should go. When all the answers were properly filled in, one of the columns said, "Say St. Peter to Bill." Upon following that instruction, Bill provided a final puzzle, the answer to which was Monopoly. As it happened, a sealed Monopoly set was laying on one of the tables near my team.
And here's where the respect I mentioned early came back to bite me. We searched all over the box for some clue to the location of the treasure, but couldn't find anything. We searched the room for something else relating to Monopoly, but came up empty. It never occurred to us to open the set because it didn't belong to us, and that was just not cool. So for 45 minutes we hunted fruitlessly for some clue. Another team finally caught up to us, found the Monopoly set, and were equally clueless about how to continue. Finally, I asked Bill if we had to open the set. He indicated that we might. So throwing caution to the wind (and over the protest of the other team), I opened the set. And found nothing. We searched through the title deeds, Chance and Community Chest cards to no avail. Then I noticed that the bag of tokens and dice were missing. So I thought that perhaps the bag was hidden somewhere in the room. While our team was off looking, the other team found the treasure. Our team hadn't noticed that the bag of hotels was open. Inside, two hotels had been stuck together. Prying them apart revealed a rolled-up dollar bill, on which the word
TREASURE had been written.
The end of the hunt caused a fair share of controversy. Out team was upset because the Monopoly set was shrink-wrapped (Bill was rather proud of that touch), and it was unthinkable to us to open it. I was frustrated that we'd "wasted" 45 minutes hunting fruitlessly when we could have been playing other games, but in the end, I was the one who actually opened the game. Had our team been more thorough in our search, we would have found the treasure. Of course, had we opened the set 45 minutes earlier, we certainly would have found it before anyone had gotten that far. So while I don't think the set should have been shrinkwrapped, I do believe the outcome was fair.
And although we didn't win, our team could claim the moral victory of solving more puzzles faster than the other teams. I really enjoyed it, as did most of the other participants— even the ones who were hopelessly stuck on the harder puzzles (and there were a bunch of them). I hope Bill considers running another one in the future.
So why get all hot and bothered about winning the treasure hunt or other tournaments? Aside from bragging rights, there lots of more tangible reasons— all of them sitting on the prize table. One of the requirements for attending the Gathering is that you bring at least one game to be used as a prize. Many people brought more than one, and Alan brought dozens of games back from Essen expressly for the prize table.
Everyone who attends winds up leaving with a prize, even if they never win a tournament. In fact, most people left with three or more. But the winners get first pick, and some of the items on the table were coveted by many. Some of the items scarfed up early included Schoko & Co. (an out-of-print game about running a chocolate factory which is widely considered to be one of the best business games ever), a wooden Cathedral set, and a mint copy of Dune. Once the winners took their picks, other items were held up one by one. Anyone who wanted them rolled five dice, with the highest roll winning the item. Nobody was allowed to take a second prize until everyone had their first.
But these games were really just icing on the cake. The true prize was hanging out with a friendly, knowledgable group of gamers, renewing old friendships, and making new ones. Someone joked that the event should be called The Gathering of People Who Would Be Friends If They Lived Closer to Each Other, which gets right to the heart of it. Same time next year, guys.
The Game Report Online - Editor: Peter Sarrett (editor@gamereport.com)