This has been a busy week for new games for me. Well, two weeks actually since I played Puerto Rico for the first time the week before, which I believe I already posted about.
Robo Rally
One of my friends had me get this for him during my last CSI order. We played this three times and it is absolutely fantastic. I love the chaotic nature of the game. Thanks for AstroLad and everyone else who has been talking up the game.
There were five us playing so it almost always assured that someone was near you to possibly mess up your programming path. It also doesn't help that we are all a bunch of jackasses and will go out of our way to try and shove someone off the board or into a pit, even if it is going to slow us down from getting to the next checkpoint. Only bad thing is we messed up a rule about what happens when a conveyor belt moves you onto a turn screw, but we consistent about it so it didn't favor any one player.
Axis & Allies Pacific: 1940 Edition
I never played the original Pacific version, so I am not entirely sure how they compare, but I played a ton of Revised going back to high school and Anniversary Edition since its release. Before getting into the game, I have to say I am sort of disappointing with how sloppy the release of this game was by Avalon Hill. It really looks like they were rushing to get this out before the holidays. They had to post a 7 page FAQ and errata correcting the printing errors in the game. This includes two mistakes on the setup instructions, plus they fucked up and printed the wrong combat board (although apparently they will at least replace that).
The parts (or lack there of) feel sort of cheap for how expensive the game is. They no longer include money. Instead they expect you to keep track of it all on paper. The IPC tracking board is smaller then in the past, as is the combat board (and as I said earlier, it is misprinted anyway). You also don't have as many dice or gray/red chips for tracking multiple units on a single territory as in the past, although I suppose that is a smaller complaint. It is just sort of disappointing compared to with what you get from a Fantasy Flight game for a similar price.
I enjoy some of the new mechanics they added to the game. Everyone starts at peace except for Japan/China. It allows them to try and model the expansion of the US economy from wartime to peace time, even if it seems a bit abrupt. By that I mean the US starts with a small amount of IPCs per turn, but once they enter the war it increases by 40 per turn. It also gives a few options to the Japanese player, since he can choose to just focus on China for a few turns or go ahead an plan an early attack against the US or the UK.
They also added some new structures to the game, including naval bases and airbases. The naval bases give an extra movement point to ships leaving from that territory for the turn. It is also what is now required to repair damaged battleships and carriers, as opposed to them magically fixing themselves. The airbases also add movement to planes, plus give an ability called scramble which allows your ground based planes to assist in sea battles. They also finally added convoy disruption and kamikaze attacks for Japan.
The game itself is fun. There were three of us playing; myself as Japan, one of my friends as the US, and the other as China, the UK, and ANZAC (Australia and New Zealand). I chose to focus on China at the beginning, knowing the UK wouldn't attack me first since it wouldn't bring the US in the war. I was getting lucky rolls all day long, and took a majority of China while barely losing anything. This allowed me to focus on building up my navy and invasion fleets. So on the 3rd turn, I went ahead and attacked the US and UK before they would join the war anyway. This allowed me to grab the Philippines and the most of southeast Asia. Then due to a stupid mistake by the US player, I was able to wipe out several of his ships at Iwo Jima with kamikaze attacks, while using my fleet to annihilate the rest of his at Hawaii. I conquered it a turn later and they conceded, since I was just one major city away from victory and they had no way to stop me from grabbing Sydney.
Dominion
After we finished A&A, the three of us played a quick game of Dominion. I am not honestly a fan of the supply cards the instructions suggest for your first game. With the exception of the militia card, it seemed like there was very little interaction between players. I can definitely see what the attraction most people have to the game and I did enjoy it, but next time we are going to use different supply cards more tailored to how we play games.
