The Princes of Machu Picchu love the llama

My monthly game night was called off due to the host's sickness, which left me falling back to a regular Wednesday game night at Green Lake Games (7509 Aurora Ave N, in Seattle). I played one game of Race for the Galaxy, and then jumped into today's game topic: The Princes of Machu Picchu.

My good friend Dan almost lured me into a 10-day South American trip, including Machu Picchu. The expenses for it were high - probably around $10k by the end of the trip. It would have included the Galapago Islands, which is known for its unique wildlife and extreme protection of the place. (Only a certain number of people per boat can be onshore at any one time. If you're on a larger boat, you'd have to take shifts - and it's supposed to get too busy permanently soon. It sounds like a game idea!)

But Machu Picchu was the draw. When I was younger, I had a strong fascination with archaeology. Incans, Mayans, Troy, Greece, Crete...in 5th grade I was placed into a talented & gifted program for an archaeology class, along with 7 other students from other schools in the district. Anyhow, the trip would have been maybe 2 days of MP, which was the ultimate no-go statement.

The game, The Princes of Machu Picchu, is designed by Mac Gerdts. He also designed Antike, Imperial, and Hamburgum. Antike is the first game I played of his - the rondel was excellent, and made the game graceful and elegant. He continued the use of the rondel in Imperial. Imperial is a favorite of my friends...instead of a war game, it's an investment game where whoever controls the most shares in a country calls the shots. Imperial broke from the elegant model, so I've skipped Hamburgum for now. PMP was a store copy, so no greenbacks were harmed for this brief review.

PMP has three elements to the game - your runner, who runs laps up the mountain, measuring your favor with the gods. Your princes rack up free gifts (and trigger peasants) and let you buy priests/virgins/peasants. Your peasants occupy spaces where goods are produced - if any prince comes along to pick up a free item, you can spend a corn (the currency) to buy that good too. If you have more peasants there, you can trigger multiple times.

The game uses a wide variety of mechanics in the game - movement of the princes, resource management, lots of guesswork on the motives of other players, the loose turns (who's going to end the round, and when?), and trying to figure out the scores of your opponents.

The 5-player game wrapped up in about 2.5 hours. We spent most of the game thinking the game would end on one of the three conditions, but was averted in the final moments. There's so much going on, with so many options, you can't efficiently guess player motives, except for possibly the last round.

The upsides of the game, is that there's usually always something interesting to consider. You can adapt your VP cards when you draw new ones, freeing you from a bad draw on previous card draws. You can frequently get stuff for cheap, if you want to invest in infrastructure (which means not investing in things that give you favor.) And you can say "llama" a lot, which was fun.

It is not the hyper-elegant game of Antike - the mechanics deal in a lot more variety of options. As such, you witness analysis-paralysis in most players, even if they aren't normally pre-disposed to it. And with all of the options, your ability to guess player motives (which are very important) is severely hampered. After a first game of it, I would be hard-pressed to say I guessed anyone's plays correctly more than 30% of the time.

This is still a fair game, which will see 4-5 plays this year. New players can play it with little introduction and few rules hang-ups.

Puerto Rico and its blue and yellow socks

We had an excellent game day today, before the snow started falling in downtown Seattle. We opened with quick games of Dominion, switched to 5-player Race, and then we hit Puerto Rico with 5. (We wrapped up with 4-player Settlers and a final game of Race.)

They were all games played with good gamers (who are also good friends). There's always a bit about what feels random...it was on my mind after reading the "Statistically Speaking" article on Gamasutra (link in the sidebar). The topic crept into tonight's game, as we started Puerto Rico. How do you determine who goes first? My standard way is take 5 barrels, 4 corn, 1 indigo...whoever gets the indigo starts. Fast, quick, doesn't need dice or prolonged discussions of how to best use rock-paper-scissors in a group environment. (I'm also of the belief that RPS is not random, and would not be useful in determining a necessarily random behavior!)

My friend said the magic words of "Wait - let me do it!" He has a new way. Take 3 indigo tiles, 2 corn tiles, and let players take tiles clockwise until the system is revealed. For example, Player A takes a tile, reveals indigo. Player B takes a tile, reveals corn. This would mean that Player A is third player with the last indigo, Player B is fourth player with the first corn! (In Puerto Rico, the first three players in the order start with indigo, the last 2 players get corn.)

That certainly seems magical, right? Something seemed fishy, but the bottle of wine that we had been sharing in celebration of the snow seemed to lighten our spirits...so we continued as it was decided. (He showed the system for Indigo/Indigo/Corn or Indigo/Indigo/Indigo - you only needed to go as far as three players.)

Of course, being gamers we yearn to have complete knowledge. We argue over what the best Settlers placement was, whether it's better or worse for random distribution of numbers, ways to eliminate/reduce/create 'luck' in favorite games...and we will now circle back to the magical method.

It makes for a great scam.

We'll start at a table where I'm playing with Alice, Bob, Charlie, myself, and my buddy Jack. I'm the person getting everyone to sit down, and I will use the magical method as described above. I'll choose Alice to start, going clockwise around to Bob and then Charlie as needed. 5 face-down tiles, 3 indigo, 2 corn - just like the game.

Yes, it's true that any player has a 60% of starting the game with an indigo, or a 40% chance to start with a corn plantation. But the next step is where it breaks - we're not dealing with replacement...they're related events.

Let's start with that 60% indigo tile draw for Alice. Alice is happy - she is now one of three indigo players, and therefore has a 1 in 3 chance of going first! Not quite. Bob has 4 tiles left - 2 indigo, 2 corn. If Bob gets a corn tile, he is first corn and therefore Alice is third indigo. Bob draws corn half the time - half of that 60% we had, Alice goes third (30%). If Bob gets indigo, Charlie has 1 indigo, 2 corn left. If Charlie gets a corn (a 2 in 3 chance), he becomes first corn, and Alice's indigo draw earlier puts her as 2nd player. (20% chance, as it's 2/3 of 30%.) The remaining 10% chance is Alice's chance to go first.

Alice could have drawn corn, 40% of the time. Alice would be happy again, assuming she hasn't learned her lesson from indigo discussions. There's a 50/50 chance that she is first corn player! Sadly, the magical method will fail her here as well. Bob would be left with 1 corn, and 3 indigo to draw from - 3 times out of 4, he'll draw an indigo, making her last player.

Alice's breakdown:
1st player: 10%
2nd player: 20%
3rd player: 30%
4th player: 10%
5th player: 30%

Now, if I were a devilishly clever person of low morals, and wanting to be first indigo or first corn (first player & fourth player, respectively), I would look to the person to my right and say "Hey, choose a tile and reveal it for yourself. Now do the same for me, as I finish setting up the game!" 60% of the time, I'd start as first corn or first indigo.

And that ends the story of the horribly magical method, that you should never ever use in polite company...or mine.

Battlestar Galactica and why you can't trust me.

Last night some friends and I played the Battlestar Galactica board game from Fantasy Flight Games. One of the guys had played it before, so we received a quick overview of the game. Quick means 5 minutes or less, with most of it explained as we go.

It's a cooperative game, in the vein of Shadows over Camelot, where the game is difficult to win, and there's a possibility that someone is betraying their friends. Except in this case, up to 2 players can be Cylons hidden in the midst of the players...but the players might not even become Cylons until halfway through the game (there is a mandatory trigger).

The mechanics were quick to understand after a complete set of turns for each person. It may be difficult for some players to correctly guess "how much population can we afford to lose" in the first time playing the game. It will probably be difficult for the Cylon player the first time - when do you reveal yourself as a Cylon? Early? Late? Never? It does mean that you should play the second game, just to get your own idea for tempo.

The game is supposed to take 2 hours. I think we took 3-3.5 hours to finish - first time players, distractions from other games going on, and ...it's not going to be 2 hours. I would say that most of the 'fun' is guessing who the Cylon is. In the six-player game, if both Cylons were revealed, we would have played a lot faster. As it was, the second Cylon didn't appear until nearly the end of the first half. (Gaius was dealt both.)

This didn't stop us from accusing other players of being a Cylon, even through there was only one at the table. As I said, this was the fun bit. Can you tell who the bad person is, by what cards they play, or don't play? Even if you don't actually get to see their cards going into the pot? These discussions were the best part of the game, but also took up most of the time. You want to spend less time discussing? I don't think it's going to be much fun then.

In the end, we scraped by with a win. The president turned out to be the second Cylon, but she didn't switch sides early enough to take advantage of her special Cylon card. Early enough being 2 turns around the board. from the end of the game. We even spent 4 "good-guy" turns, knowing she was the Cylon, but none of us having enough cards to put her in the Brig. A last-minute, once-a-game ability stopped Gaius from choosing to fail a card...otherwise we would have run out of Morale and lost the game. (Population, Fuel, and Food were all dangerously low as well, but those were probably managed correctly.)

The mechanics for passing/failing challenges as a group was solid. The theme was excellent. The duration of the game was long - discussions of traitors was the primary 'fun' of the game, but it took a correspondingly more large chunk of time for it. There were rules that weren't well executed in the rulebook/cards, which is sad to see from a professional view. (Nukes, Executive Orders.)

My last comment is for the late Cylon addition in the second half. It sucks if you have no time as the Cylon, and that you have to switch gears in mid-game to play the bad guy. All of the 'trust' issues that the players spend so much time on, in the first half, has to be discarded and begun again...which is painful for everyone.

Is it the perfect cooperative-traitor game? No.
Is it a good one? Certainly.