Great Walls I had never even heard of this game until Mark brought it over. I'm not familiar with its designer, Benjamin Cedarberg. It appears to be a self-published game with a number of similarities to Go. The game comes with small bits of crushed gravel in four different colors. The board is a fairly large vinyl mat with a grid of squares. Players place their rocks on the board, one per square, forming walls to su-round territory. Cards determine the number of stones and the configuration in which they are placed. These cards depict 1-5 stones in a wide variety of orientations, which reminds me a lot of the plastic shapes in Blokus. Each player holds a hand of five cards. On his turn he plays one and places the stones as depicted. He then gets to draw a new card. Play continues until everyone passes due to not being able to make a play. Players can opt to discard their entire hand on their turn and draw a new one instead of placing stones. The idea is to completely surround territory with your stones, each surrounded square being a point at the end of the game. Enemy stones that are surrounded during the game are removed from the board. Unlike Go, these are not scored, just removed. Another difference is that the edge of the board itself is not a wall, you must place stones in those spaces to form a wall. Mark and Rick began the game by staking out corners, while Helen and I both played near the center. We both soon drifted toward our own separate corners though, and the game started becoming a race to see who could surround the biggest corner area first. As we built more towards the middle, we started taking the opportunities to invade each other's potential territories. I had been the greediest, and had started roping off the largest area. I wasn't able to get it closed off before Rick was able to drop a line of rocks down the edge of the board into it. Then, as the others finished off their corner territories, they began to look for open space where there were still legal plays. Unfortunately, the only spots left were in my yet-to-be-enclosed area where I was still fighting Rick. The game finally ended when the space ran out. My feelings for the game are rather mixed. I've been learning to play Go recently and can't help but compare the two. It feels a lot like Go because they share the same objective, surrounding territories. The fact that stones are played on the squares rather than the intersections as in Go doesn't change the general feel. The big difference is, while Go is entirely devoid of luck, it is very much a factor in Great Walls. While it's easy at first to start your walls, as the game progresses and the board gets crowded, you are often dependent on drawing the right card. I often knew what I wanted to do, but was unable to get the card to do it. This got very frustrating, especially toward the end. The game also seemed rather boring the first half, as we built up our territories. It only got really interesting when we finally started bumping into each other. Perhaps with experience we would play more aggressively early on. Another, more minor quibble, is with the rock bits. This is a very nice idea, but in practice it doesn't quite work. The gravel bits vary in size but are generally much smaller than the squares on the board. It is rather difficult to easily see the continuity of the walls. Glass stones of uniform size would work much better. Also, a few of the colors are hard to distinguish. So all in all, I'd have to say it wasn't a bad game, but not a great one either. I'd play it again, but really, I'd rather just play Go instead. Fabrik der Träume We've played Ra several times recently, so it was only natural to move on to another Knizia auction favorite. This is probably my favorite of the trilogy that includes Ra and Medici, so I was more than happy to bring it out and explain the rules to Helen and Rick, both new to the game. After looking over the tiles available the first quarter, I focused my energy on quickly completing Gone with the Wind. This depleted my initial contracts early, causing me to sit out of the bidding for a while, but it paid off handsomely. Not only did it get an award for First Drama pro-duced, it also was the Best Picture, at 15 stars, for the first two quarters. I then worked on producing a "worst" picture, grabbing up poor quality actors that others weren't interested in this early. This gave me first pick at the parties, a privilege I enjoyed at for the rest of the game. Unfortunately, Rick was able to make an even worse picture than mine, but I was able to see it coming before completing mine and I gave it a boost before completion. John and I tied for Best Director at the end, canceling out the award. Helen ended up with the overall Best Picture, but I was able to get at least Best Picture in one of the categories and a total of four movies completed, giving me an easy win. Trendy We play this with lightning speed nowadays. I'm starting to get burned out on it, just in time for the new edition coming out. I expect I'll have to play it a lot more. Guillotine We decided to squeeze in one more game and Helen suggested this old favorite. Since we had subjected her to a couple of new games with which she was not impressed, we obliged. Noble heads were soon rolling. This game is purely tactical in nature. You simply play your best action card when it is your turn. Anything can happen in between so there isn't any planning. With a humorous if tasteless theme, it still makes a decent, light filler to end the evening. Flaschenteufel This is yet another quirky trick-taking game. These have been all the rage with some in our group lately, including me. Since this one is out in a nifty new edition, I was eager to give it whirl to see if it is unique and worthy enough to add to our collection. As it turns out, Mark has a copy of the old version, so we sat down to play an inaugural three-player game with Ed while another group started Alhambra at another table. Fortunately, Ed seemed to have a pretty good understanding of the rules, which were bizarre enough to take every brain cell I possess to digest as I listened to his explanation. By the end I had decided that I would really have no clue how to proceed until we had played a few rounds and I had seen how the unusual mechanisms played out. This of course guaranteed that I would be the owner of the Imp (think "Old Maid") at the end of the round. As-a-matter-of-fact, I ended up holding this foul creature at the end of two of the three we played. Guess in which place I finished? Helen arrived while we were playing, so we quit at the end of three rounds. I felt nowhere near figuring this game out and was just barely starting to see a few strategies. It seems to be one of those chaotic games where you have a few basic strategies, but are usually reacting to dramatic changes to the situation, the main change being the Imp's value. I'm looking forward to exploring the game further. Right now I'd be hard-pressed to give my opinion of it, but I'm definitely drawn to its weirdness. We now had quite a crowd and enough for three tables. One of our group's problems is deciding on which games to play and with this many people it was looking like it was never going to be settled. So, I picked up my first choice, Magna Grecia, set it up and started reading the rules. Having a game out and ready seems to attract players. Mark and Ed decided to join me. Magna Grecia We were slow to get started, with Ed running off to explain the rules to another game before coming back and explaining Magna Grecia. Unfortunately, the yelling and laughter of kids playing video games nearby drowned him out. After shooing them upstairs, we were finally able to get down to business. I thoroughly enjoy several games by both Leo Colovini and by Michael Schacht, so I was really looking forward to this one, a dual effort from both. I was not disappointed. This game reminds me a bit of two of Schacht's other games, Paris Paris and Web of Power, in that scoring occurs through the building of networks with a majority mecha-nism thrown in the mix as well. However, Magna Grecia feels heavier than the other two, with much more thinking and calculating. The game is very dry, but that is not necessarily a detriment in my book. As far as the appearance goes, while the colors aren't my favorites, they are nowhere near as bad as people make them out to be. Early on, I could see that having a presence in the center of the board was important, so I staked out some claims there. I also worked on developing the right side of the board, which included a few oracles. The frustrating thing, of course, is you never have enough actions to do what you want. Then you have to spend precious actions replenishing your supply of tiles from which to work. On top of that, you also have to be careful to not run out of money. And since money is what wins the game, you must speculate that you will get a good return from your purchases. Combine that with the fact that you are never quite sure, but only have an idea, of turn order and number of tiles allowed on a given turn and you get a game with plenty of tension and tough decisions. There is much more speculating early in the game and it gradually tends towards more obvious decisions as the board fills up. Still, we had some maneuvering and clever plays over oracles near the end and the game remained interesting. The last turn did drag a bit with players maximizing their score, but the time spent wasn't really excessive. I was pleasantly surprised with my score and was left with a very favorable first impression. Back to Table of Contents -- Game! # 2 To Game! List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by George Phillies. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com