Travelling Elves

Corporate Game night last Monday was a welcome break after a coding deadline. We had 6 players show up, and so Jamie suggested Elfenland, introducing it to us as “The Travelling Salesman Problem: the Boardgame.” It’s not entirely an accurate description, as I think the travelling salesman problem doesn’t usually involve playing cards to determine what paths you can go down. However, given that we work in a software company and had at least 3 Ph.D.s at the gaming table, it definitely led to lots of geeky jokes about lines, circles, and optimization.

The actual object of the game is to visit as many cities on the map as you can in four turns. Each round, you and your fellow players get to play counters to choose what transportation modes can be used on particular paths through the land. Then, after all the counters have been placed, you play cards in your hand to travel between various cities.

The game was a close one. Three of us (Jamie, Steve, and me) ended in a tie for first, having visited all but one city and having no cards remaining in our hands. The other three players had visited all but two cities, so there really wasn’t much daylight between first and last place. It was a fun game, and I wouldn’t mind playing it again sometime.

Oh, That Jokulhaups

We skipped Lunchtime Magic two weeks ago because of a product deadline, so it felt very good to actually have a match this week. I brought my Elephant deck, and Mike had a blue-red deck with phasing. It took me a while to get the feel of his deck, at least partly because he had a lousy draw in the first game andthe Elephant deck got off to what is for it a fast start (turn 1 Elephant Graveyard, turn 2 Emerald Medallion, turn 3 Call of the Herd and leave Elephant Graveyard untapped).

During the second game, it became clear what was going on. He had out some sort of large blue phasing creature that caused his land to phase out when the creature phased in. I had gotten him down to 10 life, but then, while his creature was phased out, he cast Jokulhaups, getting rid of everything in the game except two indestructible artifacts he had and his phased-out creature. Then he pummeled me with it for the remainder of the game. By the time I was about to die, I finally had enough land to flashback a Call of the Herd, but it was too late by that point. A slight bright spot was that I got to use “Harm’s Way” to clobber one of his blockers at one point. Mike pointed out to me that I might be better off with Giant Growth. I think that having the potential to actually re-direct the damage makes Harm’s Way worth it in white decks that have no other way to do directed damage, but I could be wrong.

We decided to play faster decks for the third game, and we ended up with his Varchild’s War-Riders deck versus my Knight of New Alara deck. The War-Riders give your opponent more and more 1/1 creatures, and the War-Riders themselves are trample and get +1/+1 for every creature blocking them after the first. He got a War-rider and a Tempting Licid out quickly and that pretty much ended the game . At that point, I had no creatures yet, and any that I cast would have been forced to block. The Knight deck utterly failed me: I drew about 8 land, plus only two creatures, one Knight and one Steward of Valeron. The only good thing was that I was able to enchant each of them with Shield of the Oversoul so that they were indestructible and flying, so they were able to do damage to the War-Riders. The Steward was even able to attack, because he has vigilance. I might almost have been able to win except that he also got out some other enchantment that gave his creatures bonuses for being blocked, plus another War-Riders to put even more tokens into play on my side.

Afterward I looked through the Knight deck again. I am wondering if 22 land is too much for that deck. I think it might be able to get by with less, though I’m not ready to try it unless I notice another couple games where the 8-land draw occurs.

Beating the Trading Post

“All right,” I said to Kiddo #1, “What did you do in that game?”

We had been playing with the Best Wishes set from the Dominion:Intrigue expansion, and he had gotten, I think, 6 provinces — probably the worst beating he’d ever given me. I’d been experimenting and had bought a few too many action cards, but the game had gotten way out of hand before I realized what was going on.

So he let me in on his secret: Trading Post plus Courtyard. Courtyard to get just enough card draw to ensure that he would usually have a match, and Trading Post to turn coppers into silvers. He says that in most games, you need an Upgrade to turn the Trading Post into a gold later.

We played a couple more games with that set, while I tried to find a combo that could beat the Trading Post. I did beat it at least once with a Scout/Wishing Well combo, but it was a close enough game that I’m not comfortable saying that it was a sure thing. Seems like Trading Post is a better card than I had been giving it credit for, and he did well to come up with the combo.

Inter-family Gaming

Our friends Sarah and Matt liked out Dominion session from early September so well that they bought the game. A couple weeks back, we went over there for a Sunday afternoon game session, which introduced us to Cartagena and also featured 3 games with the Dominion: Intrigue expansion.

Cartagena is a nice, fast, clever strategy game, whose basic object is  to move pawns along a track to the end. Supposedly there’s a pirate jailbreak theme painted on, but you have to really want to see it. Each space has a symbol, and you are given cards that match. You play cards to move your pawns:  you can move a pawn onto the farthest uncovered symbol that matches your card. The cool catch is that in order to collect new cars, you have to move backward, and how far back you move depends on the position of other pawns on the board. The game did slow down somewhat the second time as we all analyzed the moves a bit more, but it was still pretty fast. All in all, an interesting game, easy to learn and engaging.

For the three Dominion sessions, we shuffled together both the base set and the expansion. We allowed a lot of selection in terms of which cards we kept and which we got rid of, and this more or less guaranteed cards that we all liked. I don’t recall any details other than I think that I tied for first with my Devoted Wife in the last game, and I remember Market and Envoy being an important part of my victory.

It wasn’t until we were on the way home that my Devoted Wife and I realized that someone in our family had won all five games. Will we get invited back? Stay tuned…

Where Be Dragons?

Lunchtime Magic this week featured four matchups. I’m going to quickly summarize them here.

Match #1, Alara Dragons vs. Quick Critters — my Dragon deck is no match for Mike’s eight-land, one-cost creature deck. I was just warming up by the time he rolled me over.

Match #2, Knight of New Alara vs Quick Critters — these two decks are much more evenly matched. He made a bad first move by sacrificing the only land in his initial draw to play Rogue Elephant. I sent it away using Path to Exile, and since his deck has no basic land, that was pretty much the end of the match.

Matches #3-4, Alara Dragons vs. Pandemonium — Mike’s Pandemonium deck has lots of heavy casting cost creatures with high power. It doesn’t matter if they actually attack, as they do damage as soon as they’re cast. We split these two games, but it was a pretty good matchup. In both games, I did some fast damage to him by bringing Elves and token creatures into play. Mogg War Marshal was particularly helpful, as I could do more damage by failing to pay its ‘Echo’ cost.

The interesting observation here is that the Alara Dragon deck has not won with a Dragon since its revision a month or two ago. In its wins to date, Colossal Might and the hoard of fodder creatures have been the keys to victory. It may just be that I need to add more cards with Devour. On the other hand, in the first game, I ended up with a hand full of cards that were too big to cast right away and no fodder. There’s clearly a balance here that I want to maintain and I think I need more plays to figure out which side of it I’m on.

Time Sieve vs. Dragons

Last week’s lunchtime Magic didn’t go as well as it could have. I was playing the Time Sieve deck, and Mike was playing his Dragon deck, the point of which (in case I haven’t mentioned before) is not to actually cast dragons but to put them into play with Dragonstorm. It was about 50 minutes into our lunch hour when we realized we’d been playing the ’storm’ effect wrong. The point of ’storm’ is that it puts one copy of the spell on the stack for each spell cast before it in a turn. Both times he’d tried to play it I’d countered the initial casting. What we didn’t realize right away was that this didn’t counter the spell copies, so he still should have had multiple dragons in play. Clearly this would have made a huge difference in the way the game was played, so the results (I had won one game, and was ahead on the one in progress) were not actually valid.

I like the Time Sieve deck a lot, but it’s not particularly friendly in our environment. It’s fun because it is different than most of the decks that I play. The thing that makes it unfriendly is that we play creature-heavy decks, and it has lots of spells to hold those decks in abeyance until it can take many turns in a row and overwhelm the opponent with artifacts. We agreed that next time we play, Mike should bring a fast creature deck to have a better chance against it.

Race for the Galaxy: A Question of Balance

There’s not been much time for gaming around here since school started in earnest, so I was happy to sit down with Kiddo #1 and play Race for the Galaxy last Sunday. In our last game, he had drawn Galactic Federation and used that to clean up with a bunch of six-cost developments. This time, I drew Galactic Federation and returned the favor. I ended up with a 15-card tableau (2 develops, plus a military settle on the last turn). I think my score was about 30 points higher than his.

It really seems to me like this game has gotten much less balanced with the expansion sets. I don’t remember these huge blowouts happening before we got the latest expansion. In our last few sessions, we’ve had some close games, but we’ve also had several really lopsided games as well. It’s possible that we’re still just adjusting to the new cards (we don’t play the game all that often), but it seems more likely to me that with the expansions there’s just a larger difference between a really good tableau and an average to below-average tableau. Of course, my sample size is small enough here that it’s very difficult to generalize, and I really haven’t had time to gather more samples…

Devoured

The lunchtime Magic match-up last week was my retooled Dragon deck versus Mike’s artifact deck. I had acted on my realization from a few weeks back, that my Dragon deck needed to be remade into a pure Devour deck, in the process making it Red-Green rather than Red-Green-Black. I added Green fodder to the deck in the form of Llanowar Elves and Pyknite. (Pyknite is a placeholder for the card which I’d rather have in there, Elvish Visionary: I just don’t currently own any.) I was fortunate enough to draw Doubling Season early on. We both had sub-optimal draws: I drew all fodder and only one dragon, and he drew many artifact-turning effects and not much artifact destruction. My only dragon was a good one: Hellkite Hatchling devoured 5 fodder critters, which with Doubling Season in play made him a 12/12. I had an Avoid Fate to counter the return-to-hand spell that he tried to play on it, but that left me open to a Shatterstorm. Finally, while waiting to draw another dragon, I realized I had 8 creatures and he had 3 blockers. I knocked him down to 3 life and then to 1, while he wasn’t really able to do much in return. On my last turn I drew Banefire, but it wasn’t necessary.

In hindsight, Doubling Season was the game-winner for me: it was the reason I had enough creatures to overwhelm his defense. In the Devour deck this is an absolutely awesome card, and I would own more of them if they weren’t so darned expensive right now.

For the second game, we didn’t have much time left, so we both chose different decks. I had my Knight of New Alara deck, and he had a three-color angel deck. Early in the game, I dispatched one of his creatures with a Path to Exile, which gave him a fourth land. Turned out that, with a Pearl Medallion already in play, that was all the land he needed to cast a Serra Angel, of which he then proceeded to draw three. Despite this, I came close — the Knight deck is pretty fast and I had a good draw. I made one other fatal mistake, enchanting a Bant Sureblade with Shield of the Oversoul when it would have been better spent to enchant Knight of New Alara and give me a second attacking creature.

After Action Report: Blood Feud

My friend Rick and I got together on Labor Day for a game of Fed Commander. We played the scenario “Blood Feud” from Captain’s Log #37. In this scenario, a Hydran Dragoon, Knight, and Curaisser fight a Lyran CA, DD, and FF in an asteroid field. (The original scenario calls for Kzinti and Lyran, but one of our goals was to play with races from the Distant Kingdoms module, so we replaced Kzinti with Hydrans.)  After some discussion, we let the Hydrans keep all three fighters on the Dragoon, even though it tilted the point values in favor of the Hydrans (the original scenario gave the Kzintis a 30-point advantage, 323 to 289, so we were only piling 10 more points on top of that). I played the Lyrans.

We each began turn 1 with only our frigates on the board, one on each of the center panels. I elected to be aggressive and start closer to the center of the map. On turn 1 I loaded up the ESGs and moved speed 8. He had plotted a speed of zero. I managed to get him at range 6 with a +1 shift from asteroids, meaning that none of our weapons were very effective. My disruptors scratched his shield and I used my ESG to cancel his Hellbore.

On turn 2 the larger ships arrived. The price I paid for being aggressive was to be closer to his ships than to my own. My frigate moved close to and unloaded on his frigate, but didn’t come out much ahead in the process despite having heavy weapons available. Then my frigate ran back toward my other ships, but was caught by the Hydran Knight destroyer. This did a real number on the frigate, which didn’t blow up but didn’t have much left. Better for the Lyrans was that the Knight pursued my destroyer into the asteroids and unluckily took 20 points on the front shield. He chose to get out of the asteroids at that point, and unfortunately ended up facing that week front shield right at my heavy cruiser, which had not yet fired. That was the last turn for the Hydran destroyer. The Hydran Dragoon also fired at my ships but it was a bit further away and so didn’t do as much.

On turn 3, I decided to go toe-to-toe between his Dragoon and my heavy cruiser since it was the off-turn for his hellbores. This didn’t turn out to be a great decision: I missed with 2 of 3 overloaded disruptors and one normal disruptor. I actually took more damage from him than I managed to inflict, and I did not hit any of the unlaunched fighters. However, I managed to knock down a shield, and he didn’t destroy all of my transporters (somehow, I managed to get all of his), so I did hit-and-run raids which did destroy one fighter inside the bay. Over the remainder of the turn, the two remaining fighters weren’t much of a factor: I blew one up before it got the chance to fire, and the other only managed a range-2 shot with a +1 asteroid shift for little damage.

Turn 4: The remaining fighter, perhaps mortified that it had been mostly ineffective so far, flew by and finished off my frigate. Meanwhile the larger ships (my CA and DD, his CA and FF) jockeyed for position. We ended the turn 3 hexes apart and everyone unloaded. Here, Rick’s luck took a hard turn: he missed with three of four hellbores. This probably was decisive: it left me heavily damaged, but as I hit with most of my disruptors on this turn, my CA was in better shape than his. If more than one hellbore had hit, it would have gone ill with me as many of my shields were very weak.

Turn 5: we each managed to blow up the other’s heavy cruiser. My DD delivered the decisive blow to his cruiser with an ESG ram. His Dragoon and Frigate combined to get close to my cruiser and deliver kill it with phasers (the final hellbore shot from his Frigate also missed, adding insult to injury). At this point, I had a lightly damaged destroyer to his crippled frigate. He was able to get off the board, but the Lyrans had carried the day.

Comments: This seemed like a good scenario. The asteroid field gave both of us problems, though he had worse luck than I did. It’s been quite a while since I played with ESGs, and this was my first time using the new Fed Commander rules for them. I have to say that I think they’ve ported well over to this system: the choices are clear-cut and it’s much easier to use them. I wish that they had a range of greater than one, though in an asteroid field it’s not clear that it would have mattered.  I continue to wonder whether the Hydran stingers really needed to be restricted to only firing one of their two fusion beams every turn, a restriction that does make them less scary than in SFB (but only a little).

Time Sieve Solitaire

In lunchtime Magic last week, Mike continued to play with his Zubera deck. He beat my Elephant deck pretty handily, with an assault by about 12 spirit tokens that had been produced by a . However, I did manage to beat him with someone else’s deck. I regularly read Jacob Van Lunen’s column “Building on a Budget”. When I saw his deck listing for a Time Sieve/Open the Vaults deck back in August, I thought it looked like a lot of fun and decided to buy the cards for it and try it out. To me, part of its appeal was the complete lack of creatures, which makes it very different from every other deck I’ve ever played. The general idea is that you sacrifice artifacts to the Time Sieve (or pay for Time Walk) to take more turns, and use Open the Vaults to bring all your artifacts back afterwards so you can sacrifice them again and take even more turns. At the end, you use the special ability of Tezzeret the Seeker to make your remaining artifacts into 4/4 creatures and kill your opponent.

In the event, it turns out the Time Sieve deck is great fun to play and not as much fun to play against. I finished the game by taking four or five turns in a row, playing an “Open the Vaults” on the penultimate turn and attacking with all of my artifacts as 4/4 creatures in the final turn. During this time he was pretty much sitting there watching me. I didn’t like this feeling, so I played my Elephant deck in the next game so it would be more interactive. Maybe the Time Sieve deck is best played as a solitaire game deck, where the objective is to allow the opponent the fewest turns possible.

I find myself speculating about whether I could make this into a creature deck. One creature I could see fitting in well would be Glassdust Hulk, who becomes unblockable and gets +1/+1 every time an artifact enters the battlefield under your control. If you have one or two in play on the turn you play Open the Vaults that seems like a game-ending amount of damage. His problem is that he’s very expensive, but you can cycle him and then he comes into play for free with Open the Vaults. Of course, in that case, he’s not able to attack on that turn, so it may be too hard to make it work, but I might give it a try at some point.