The unedited version of this session report can be found with pictures www.rozmiarek.info/games/ Eiszeit This is an area majority game with a very attractive board and really cool wooden woolly mammoth pieces. The currency in the game is chips that represent rocks. The board is composed of twelve regions to fight over. The number of regions diminishes during the game as a glacier covers them. Each region has a facedown fire chip that adds to how many hunters that region can hold. Conflicts occur when the number of hunters exceeds the region's capacity. Mammoths add to this number as well as to the region's worth when it is scored. The actions on the board are card driven. You get to play one action card on your turn. These actions include adding, removing, and/or moving hunters and mammoths as well as fire chips. The really cool thing is that the cards are divided into two types - light and dark. The light deck is composed of cards that show actions that you, the active player, take. However, there is a varying cost in stone chips to play each one. The dark cards each depict an action that another player gets to take. In most cases, you get to choose the other player. However, instead of paying stones, you get stones for playing a dark card. This is the only way get the stones necessary to play the light cards that get you actions. This is a very nice balance and provides some very neat nuances to the game. You are forced to play some dark cards and the decision as to who to give the action to is very interesting. Ideally, your choice will not hurt you, but someone else instead. Trying to predict what each player will possibly do with the dark card action reminds me a bit of the card dividing mechanism in San Marco. We started seeing some of the strategies and nuances after a few scoring rounds and the game got quite vicious in the latter half. Our scores ended up being very close. My only criticism is that it was rather long at about 90 minutes. While not as strong as some of the other Alea titles, it is still a worthwhile game and I'm glad we picked it up. I would recommend the English version though, as we constantly had to refer to the card translations in the rules. Now I had to choose between San Juan and Alhambra with one of the new expansions. Since more people were clamoring for Alhambra, I decided to play San Juan. I'd played it twice already and wasn't all that impressed. It looks to be a game that gets better as one gets familiar with it, so I wanted to give it another chance. San Juan There have been a lot of strategy discussions on the internet forums about this game, but I tend to just skim those or avoid them altogether. The only thing that did stick out in my mind from those discussions was the power of the Chapel. So, when I got one of those fairly early I built it and started adding a card to it every round. I also got a Library built early and was able to later add a Black Market and a Quarry. This left me in a pretty sweet spot for building cheaply, especially when able to choose the Builder role and use the Library. Since I was holding a couple of valuable monuments, I decided to focus on building those. Here's where I made an error, though. I actually had Triumphal Arch in my hand, but I used it to build my Quarry, hoping to draw it later if I did indeed manage to build my monuments. Unfortunately, Mike had built the other Chapel and stuck the Arch under it to take it out of the game. When the game ended, I still managed to squeak out the win over Mike with my loaded Cha-pel and three monuments netting me lots of points. Both Francesca and Peter managed to do pretty well also, considering it was the first game for both of them. I enjoyed San Juan much more this time. I think this was due to knowing the cards a little better and thus being able to form a plan as the game went on. In my first two games, I felt like I was just building anything whenever I was able. Back to Table of Contents -- Game! # 6 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