Brain Dump

Nikki, Will, Delanne and I were the only people to show to board gaming night. So we played Alhambra and Manilla without you!

I like Alhambra. A lot. There are a lot of very subtle pacing control mechanisms built into the game, and that really appeals to the control-freak in me. There’s also just enough randomness that you’re always on your toes. You can never be sure that the move you’re about to make is really a good one or not. And finally, there’s this very cool level of player judgment. You may consider a certain play to not be worth anyone making, but the person who has the resources to make it might. This results in situations where you might know precisely what someone has in their hand, and still not be able to predict what they’ll do. That’s super cool.

Manilla I don’t like as much. I mean, I do like it, but it’s just too random for me. Or, rather, it’s too random for the time invested in it. At 40 to 50 minutes to play, the way that the entire game can turn on a single roll of the dice matters a lot. In fact, I’m pretty sure that Will beat Nikki out on a single roll. If his die hadn’t come up a 6, the game would have gone to her.

Now that very randomness is one of the things that really gets me excited about Pips. But Pips only takes ten minutes to play. I don’t feel that I’ve invested all this time and energy into a game of Pips only to have it come to nothing because of a single roll of the dice. So, it’s not the randomness of Manilla that bothers me, it’s the randomness combined with the relatively long play-time. I don’t feel like the game adequately rewards good play. Instead I feel as if it simply rewards lucky plays.

That said, we had a bunch of fun. I even enjoyed Manilla.

Thomas

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 10:35 and is filed under life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.