Dog Park & Mille Bournes for 5

    We had a get-together last Saturday and ended up with 5 players.  Anne & I are usually the only players, so I was curious to see how some games worked out with more.  We chose a classic (Mille Bournes) and a much more recent game (Dog Park).  

    The basics of Mille Bournes are easy to pick up, but we hit a weird situation where we ran out of mileage cards after two re-sorts.  That just didn't feel right.  The little rulebook seemed to suggest that we should be playing in teams, but the game just ended before 1000 and whoever had the most miles was the winner.  At home, I long ago drew up a curvy little race track split into 25 marks and 100 marks, so it was weird for me having to go back to placing cards in groups of 100 or 200 or whatever made sense at the time.



    We brought over Dog Park and it was fun teaching the overall gameplay.  The base game is only meant for up to 4 players so Anne & I played as a team, giving effectively 4 players.  It was interesting to see how the new players approached the different phases of the game, from the bidding on new pups to the resource gathering during the Walking phase.  To make it slightly less complex, we decided to ignore the Swap and Seek actions.  I tried my best to let the players know halfway through to pay more ttention to the Final Scoring actions on their pup cards.

    As were going into the final scoring, I prefaced it with "See what happens here ..."   That's when all the details you should have been paying attention to come back to get you.  You didn't get enough of the top breed category, other players get the boost.  Didn't meet your Objective?  In the end, the player who put 6 bones on their pup with final scoring of two points per bone just bounced ahead and won.

    One player had a nerd moment where he tried to Google and find someone who had laid out the optimal strategy for the game, but there was no such page.  The final scoring is really a scramble.  I think we agreed we should try again now that we all saw what was coming.

    Good times.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Idle Planet Miner: Selling Your Galaxy

Image
Back in Idle Planet Miner, production was starting to bog down, with crafts taking an hour apiece, and sometimes needing hundreds of items to unlock new research.  So, I figured it would be a good time to test out their "Sell Your Planet" feature, which has so many people online asking questions. These idle games can't level up through an infinite many items, so they all have this same kind of game reset mechanism.  In Idle Planet Miner, the Sell Galaxy button shows you the value of your galaxy and how many credits you will get for it.  These credits are a kind of meta currency, letting you buy new rooms for your ships, with each new room offering a different game boost.  Clicking the Sell button will show you exactly what you will lose: all planets, cash, ores, alloys, items, research.  Which sounds terrible.  But you get to keep your dark matter, your managers, your beacon buffs (though you will have to research the Beacon again to get it back on screen),...
Read more

My Only Scrabble Tournament

Image
Here is something that popped into my head randomly while trying to sleep last night ... Back in the late 90's, I was in my one and only Scrabble tournament.  It was a local fundraiser at the Escondido Public Library.  My wife-at-the-time was on my team, and two close friends were a couple on another team.  There were about 30 players, and our entry fees went to a literacy charity. I won a few rounds, and as I recall I made it to the round where there were only 2 games being played.  So if there were 32 players to start, round two would be 16, round three would be 8, round four would be those two games.  That all adds up (in my head). My fresh opponent started by saying, "Let's not add up the scores each round, so we can focus on the game.  It's such a hassle." I didn't know if there was an actual rule against doing that, but I figured I could ignore the total score.  Why should those numbers affect my choice of words anyway? In the end, we did add our...
Read more

Ancient Games Book

Image
I had a former coworker contact me to say her mom had a weird book of old games, so we met up, and it turned out to be the classic Irving Finkel "Ancient Board Games" produced by the British Museum.  Dr. Finkel is a leading expert on ancient board games, and the book covers four classics: Senet, Mehen, Hounds an Jackals and the Royal Game of Ur.  The Royal Game of Ur is one of our favorites from this era, and was one of the first games I covered in this blog series.  I was familiar with the others, but never had a decent board to play on. The book comes with a little plastic tray with four throwing sticks and 8 playing pieces for each of two colors.  In each set, one piece is larger than the others, being the "lion" in the Mehen game. After dabbling with these games for about 45 minutes, we kept having problems picking up the perfectly smooth throwing sticks, and there was no clear distinction between the flat side and rounded side, aside from the subtle shape. ...
Read more