some new eurogames

[reverancepavane]

New England is an area control game that requires you to grow livestock, vegetables and houses on a grid, and then harvest them for victory points. Growth of farms is by purchasing tiles from a random array, and harvesting them is performed by purchasing cards (of the appropriate type and shape). Additionally some cards allow the purchase of pilgrims (which generate extra money per round), ships (which may allow you to draw a new tile or card), and barns (which allow you to build barns to store future harvest, planning ahead). The problem is these purchases need land to stand on, which then can no longer be converted into victory points. Has an interesting mechanic in that the players select their order in the round, which is also the price of each of the two possible purchases each round (which must usually be used immediately). Additionally, the first player in each round (this rotates), gets to choose the ratio of tiles to cards (there will always be 3 of each, but 3 others may be of either type). Both these lead to some ability to control the game (especially given the rather limited funds normally available in each round), beyond that of area control. It works well, especially as a four player game. Having both blocked myself and having a pushy northern neighbour in round 1, my expansion options were rather limited. However I did end up cornering the pilgrim market, which meant by the end of the game my income was 11 per round, at the cost of having only converted one section of farmland into something other than condominiums for my pilgrims. However this did mean that I had to play the round order heavily to force the other players to either limit their purchases (by making it too expensive if they wanted to snatch a bargain). The end result for them was too much unharvested farmland (as they concentrated too heavily on the area control aspects of the game), but they could have easily won if they had attempted to harvest, instead of claiming more territory than they could possibly use. Oasis was a very similiar area control game, but instead of harvesting the areas one also had to obtain the appropriate scoring chits. Both tiles for expansion of areas, and scoring chits were cargoes owned by each player's caravan. Each round, the players offer up to three cards as an enticement for the other players to make a purchase. Purchases are made using the turn order chits. Unfortunately this tends to fail as a balancing mechanism unless players are actively attempting to compete against each other to gain the low turn order. Without this interaction, the game easily unbalances and becomes very uninteresting. My big problem with this game is, like most Eurogames, it assumes that the characters are at least willing to attempt to compete against each other to offer the best goods in order to attain the first position. For some reason (it wasn't planned), whenever I had a low turn order (and correspondingly high purchasing power) nobody wanted to offer anything actually worth the effort of making a purchase. Also I found it rather irritating to discover that my caravans had the cargoes that I needed to score (you cannot purchase your own goods). Again, most players concentrated too heavily on area control and too little on scoring victory points (although one player went the other way, and discovered that they couldn't play the tiles they then needed to make use of their scoring chits). Again, spoiling other players through area control seemed to be the preferred arena of competition, whereas negligible effort was done to prevent the eventual winner from gaining the scoring chits they needed (in fact, they were assisted in doing so at one point). This resulted them in scoring more than double the points of the person in second place.

Comments

[maelorin]

ah, assumptions. aint they sweet :D

a friedn (i have at least one, apparently) is frustrated with an omnipotent ai that constantly knows all about his position, and thus can move to block him, while he can never get more than barely adequate info about his electronic foe. making for some frustrating strategic gameplay ...