DATE:       Tuesday, October 29

PLACE:     Rick's

Attendees: DaveO, Rick, Matt, Steve, Kim

OCBG convened for the second time since DaveO's return from Deutchland, and more recent Essen releases were in the offing. It was DAveO, Matt, and Rick starting the night...

ZooSim, a Cwali offering which to me resembles Carcassonne mechanics, at least as far as matching pieces. ZooSim is more complex, and the scoring mechanism is very different - you try and create attractions (in the form of colored stars on the individual pieces) by piecing the tiles together in domino like fashion. Each player bids for the tiles with a set amount of chits, and ties are broken by what both David Brown and Rick called "the possession arrow". You win one tie breaker, you lose the next, basically. Rick took an early lead, and never looked back...

Rick     143

DaveO  125

Matt     103

Next was another Essen release, and one which may be generating the most buzz, Age of Steam. This is a game with a steep learning curve, I can tell you right now...but the game has possibilities. Sometimes the most rewarding games (or books, or music, or movies) are those that take some time to warm up to. That being said, the jury is out on the Martin "Liberte" Wallace design. We got through two turns, and decided (after DaveO took a huge early lead) that this would be best played on another night with more people, and probably those that lean toward the heavier game side. Here's what I didn't like, on first impression:

 - LONG initial setup, with lots of bits.

 - Very abstract Goods Delivery/income system - not very intuitive

 - *Maybe* serious advantage to those few who get good position early

Here's what I liked:

 - It's a train game, dammit!

After aborting Age of Liberte, uh Steam, we broke out a game which I have had since Wizzies put it up for half price - Elfenland. The map is excellent! It's basically an excersise in finding the shortest distance between twenty points - what Frieks would call the "traveling salesman problem". DaveO used the O'Connor advantage to it's fullest.

Note form the Gamemaster: DaveO overcame the O'Connor Disadvantage to secure his Elfenland victory.  The O'Connor Disadvantage is a lesser known corollary to the O'Connor Advantage; it simply states that due to DaveO's prior experience of playing a game, his opponents will bring as much nastiness as possible to overcome the possibly mythical O'Connor Advantage.  In this game of Elfenland I played an obstacle down which bent the Ricker's nose (even though I did explain what obstacles did), so he proceeded to lay an obstacle down on me, stating "well, if we're getting nasty", thereby prompting Matthias to go ahead and lay another obstacle on the next leg of my route, forcing me to overcome two consecutive obstacles!  But as the score shows, I still won.:*)

DaveO    19 (tiebreak = 0)

Rick       19 (tiebreak = 1)

Matt       16

Enter Dr. I and Kim, and out came Fabrik der Traume, fast becoming the favorite of the Byrens clan. For once DaveO spit out some quality movies, and smoked us! 

Another Gamemaster note: DaveO still put out a bunch of garbage flicks but managed to win the best flick in two categories with 12's!  It was the weird thing that everyone made great films in the adventure category, which I, by sheer dumb luck, stayed away from...  but I would still like to thank all the little people for this victory, without whose help I wouldn't be where I am today...

DaveO    83

Matt       67

Kim        52

Rick       48

Steve     42

Note that Steve's previously unblemished OCBG record went down in flames this night!