RogerBW's Blog

Over to a friend's place to deliver some games I'd driven back from Essen.

I've been curious for a while about the GIPF Project, and got a chance to try out DVONN. It's a basic positional game: you move an exposed stack with one of your pieces at the top a number of spaces (in a straight line) equal to the number of pieces in the stack. If anything's not connected to one of the red pieces, it's lost from the board. When nobody can move, the player with a greater total stack height wins. My response to this was to try to cut off one side of the board from all the reds, and it mostly worked.

I had a good time, and the pieces are physically lovely, though like most non-random games this is hovering on the edge of my "too chess-like" mental bucket.

On to Aeon's End, since my host hadn't tried any of the New Age content. So we had Claudia, Gygar and Lost against Maggoth; lots of damage to us, less to Gravehold, and a convincing if last-minute victory.

Then Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game, which people keep telling me they enjoy more than Ares Expedition (which I still haven't played). It's still a lightweight, fast-moving game, and the fact that my opponents both comprehensively beat me is clearly testimony to how good my teaching was.