Pandemonium Gaming

[dougo]

I played games at Pandemonium Books & Games last night, and wrote up a micro-session-report for the Unity Games mailing list:

This session of Pandemonium Gaming had 13 people at its peak, enough for three tables at once. I think there were about 15 or 16 total. Lots of new faces-- I think only 5 or 6 of us had been there for the last session. I also noticed that the store has been expanding their stock of board games; games I hadn't seen there before include Seismic (which I bought and played), Recess, Grand Tribunal, Blue Moon City, Tikal, Odin's Ravens.

Games played: Shadows Over Camelot (twice), Die Nacht der Magier, Citadels, Through the Desert, Ivanhoe, Caylus, Seismic, King's Gate.

Quick summary of Seismic: It's a hexagonal edge-matching tile placement game, somewhat like the road-building part of Carcassone. Three tiles are face up, you choose one and place it, optionally placing one of your cubes on a road fragment on that tile if it is not part of a claimed road. At the end of the game, completed roads score one point per road fragment, plus the values of its two endpoints (between 1 and 6). Uncompleted roads score nothing. Unlike Carcassonne, there is no scoring during the game; also, each player has 20 cubes, so you never have to worry about running out. The main twist is that some number of random times during the game (up to 6) there will be an earthquake, which causes some of the tiles (up to 6) to be removed in a semi-predictable manner (radiating out from the start tile, labeled "San Andreas", in the direction where there are the most tiles).

It's mostly tactical, as players just search for the highest valued placement, but it has a modicum of strategy: you can go for long routes, or short routes with high-value endpoints; you can claim roads close to San Andreas (which is a 6-point endpoint) or you can claim roads that are farther away and safe from earthquakes. There is some amount of merging and stealing, like in Carcassonne, though it is a bit harder because the tile you place has to connect to an existing road-- you can't just start a new road near someone else's road to horn in on it. You can also try to place tiles to cause a particular direction to be more earthquake-prone. Ultimately, though, the earthquakes add a lot of chaos; in our game, two earthquakes happened near the end, so the final scores ended up being pretty low as most of the big roads we had completed became incomplete (and it was too late to repair them). I know some people hate games where what you've built up can be destroyed by luck, but it wasn't enough to ruin the game for me. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but then I'm a sucker for tile-laying games.