Boardgaming has been a bit slow going due to study pressure but I've finally been able to work through a game of Macao and Dominion this week. Let me start by giving my impressions of Dominion as most of you are likely already experts at this game and then move on to Macao which probably most people do not know much about yet.
I have to admit that I was hesitant of buying Dominion at first. I saw it described somewhere as Magic, which I adore, but it seemed to lack all the elements that I found interesting in Magic (different colored decks, use of mana, private deck building). The fact that it won Spiel des Jahres didn't really say much to me either. Actually if anything it's high ranking on BGG was one of the primary reasons to still buy it. As was the fact that it is playable with 2 players and fairly easy to teach.
Starting with the basic 10 kingdom cards I was immediately drawn to the Village card. The bonus of having extra actions, which combined with more Villages, Smithy and Markets could create for some crazy long combo's. My girlfriend was a bit more confused with the game buying too many random action cards and not noticing the benefit of the Village as much as I did and thus to often had a hand full of action cards of which she could only play one.
The crazy combo's that I got from the 7 village cards that I had in the end, combined with cards like Militia (had about 3 for the extra coins and to make it even harder for her to do anything), Smithy, Market and some Cellar (to get rid of the eventual Province cards) and Workplaces (to buy free silvers, villages and smithy's) made me invincible to her way to randomized deck.
I can't remember the score but it was rather a wipe-out. Fortunately this did teach her very effectively the way you can make combo's in the game through +action and +draw cards. She did like the game a lot and so did I. It definitely scratched the Magic itch a little bit and I can't wait to start playing with other combinations of kingdom cards
Macao then is a different beast. I had set the board up twice already this week just to look at it and analyze it a bit. I was to scared to go for a solitary-2-player game as the whole thought of planning 6 turns ahead through the action cubes seemed very daunting on me. And not for not reason as while playing the game you always feel to be short on action cubes. However there is a lot of planning possible and there's a lot of different ways you can spend your cubes in order to make your strategy's variable to counter the odds of the dice rolls. I'll give a short summary of the game:
I allowed my gf to be the starting player which meant that I had the first pick of cards. I choose the card that let's you have one AC of choice each turn though it the activation costs for the card where 1 AC of 4 different colors. To make it clear how hard it was to activate this one card I'll say that I tried to put my resources into activating this card whenever possible yet at the end of the game still had the card on my tableau unactivated.
Turn 1 arrived and the two turn1 office cards where made available next to two person/building cards from the deck. The starting player had first pick which clearly was way advantageous as the office cards come in cheap and expensive (to activate) variants and especially early in the game you are extremely short on action cubes. I thus made it my key start strategy to take the starting player position away from her in the first turn. She never took it back throughout the whole game (partially due to being short on action cubes which is the key factor of the game) which on hindsight she probably should have done at key moments in order to get first pick of an office card (which can be a huge advantage). The way we played all the 24 office cards for the 12 turns where visible from the start next to the board so you could plan ahead with your strategy deciding which office cards you want to go for.
There was a lot of competition from early on around the city spaces. Both of us managed in the end game to get a largest district of 4 and around 6 city spaces total. I found the city spaces 'mini-game' to be a very interesting element of the larger game as it requires some nice strategics on what goods to take from what city spaces in order to both get a efficient sea route to deliver the goods, not spend to many action cubes taking the city spaces, and building a city districts (adjacent owned city spaces) for bonus points.
I had about 4 or 5 goods on my ship actually when my ship was still one or two spaces away from the starting position. This made me very nervous as to weather I was actually ever going to deliver any of the goods before the 12 turns where over. In the end I managed to deliver all goods (7 total over 6 harbors). The reason why I was able to move so far with my ship was due to me saving up masses of action cubes to activate the card which required 4 different colored cubes. I didn't manage to activate that card but the cubes that I thus had left over enabled me to move my ship from one end of the map to the other in only one turn. This combined with two activated cards that gave me +1 VP and +1 GC for each delivered good gave me enough VP's to win the game. Both of us had 1 penalty chip (-3) for not having any action cubes available one round and I also had 1 more penalty chip for having to many unactivated cards on my tableau one turn.
In the end it seemed that it is worth going for high dice roll numbers as often as possible though you will often tend to want to pick lower dice rolls as you are looking for specific colors or when you can't wait 4 or 5 turns till you can use your action cubes. Starting player is worth spending cubes on at the right moment but isn't always good to spend cubes on. The city spaces section is worth strategizing on before hand in order to get an efficient shipping route with lots of goods to deliver. Always make sure you have GC's available as you want to be able to exchange them for victory points when the time is right.
The end the game played much more straightforward and easy than anticipated from the start but still provided enough strategic depth. Both of us kept thinking about our game long after it had ended and that is always a good sign. Can't wait to try it out with 3 or 4 players.
