We were playing it wrong: Twilight Struggle

Just as the penitent suffers missteps during their journey toward, so to do I make tread the familiar ground of old mistakes.

The other day Alan and I were playing a game of Twilight Struggle. In a game-ending mistake, we resolved our Headline Phase cards in ascending numerical order, rather than descending numerical order, such that I ended up triggering global thermonuclear war. Sorry guys, my bad.

We were playing it wrong: Tobago

...and we're back!

Today's Victim: Tobago

It's been a while, but that more reflects on my lack of gaming than interest in this blog. I did get some gaming in over Christmas break, but mostly they were tried and true favorites or games I did not teach and thus am not responsible for any errors stemming from bad instructions from the teacher.

My streak ends today, though!

Tobago is a fantastic little strategy game with excellent bits (it comes with little Tiki/Moab statues!). Basically, you're racing around a tropical island looking for buried treasure and trying to get more of it than anyone else. To do this, you narrow down where on the island it could be (For example: next to the ocean, but not within 2 spaces of a tiki hut). Once only one spot remains, the first person there gets to unearth the treasure and collect a finders fee. After the treasure is unearthed, the goods are distributed to players who contributed to the treasure hunt in proportion to their contribution--bigger contribution, more treasure!

The rub lies in these neat little amulet tokens that allow you to break the rules in little ways--play more clues, move further, protect from curses (did I mention there's CURSED TREASURE!), etc.

Here's where I went wrong: during the explanation, I said you had to stop on a space with an amulet in order to pick it up. This is incorrect. You merely need to MOVE over the amulet during move. You don't need to stop.

I botched this one, but we caught it before it became too great an issue. On the other hand, I went a whole 3-1/2 weeks without messing up a game instruction! New High Score!

We were playing it wrong: Lost Cities

Today's victim: Lost Cities!

Readers familiar with Lost Cities will be surprised to find this entry. However, even though Lost Cities has all of 4 rules, I still managed to screw one of them up. In his case, it just about killed the game and I did not manage to catch my error until it was caught up in a trade for Cafe Guatemala (update 01/24/11: Cafe Guatemala has in the meantime been traded for Balloon Cup, which appears in a later entry on this blog! The chain of sadness continues!).

So here it is:

1. Players may draw the top card of the discard pile instead of the the top card of the deck.

It's amazing how much this little rule would have changed the game. Alas, I doubt I'll have a chance to play it correctly, but I imagine the game would have been much more fun. Sorry, Lost Cities!

We were playing it wrong: Twilight Struggle

Today's victim: Twilight Struggle!

Domino Theory, Schmomino Theory! Alan and I had occasion to play this gem a few days ago. Great game; perhaps even better once we start playing the rules correctly. Here's where we (which is to say, I) borked the rulebook.

1. Influence markers need to be placed adjacent to other influence markers. Alan and I had been playing a magical fairy game where we could lay down chits with wild abandon. Honestly, it seems like this would make it even harder for the US to make due in the Middle East and in Asia, which are two critical areas in early game. Further complication for the US was not something I anticipated discovering in my second reading of the rules--if anything, I had hoped to find errors that would make the US easier to play.

2. Space Race cards are discarded, not chucked in the box. Sigh. I knew I was getting away with too much when I chucked NATO and Bear Trap, never to return.

3. Any given Space Race benefit is eliminated when the other player achieves the requisite stage for the benefit. This will have the effect of slowing the Space Race down--also not something I thought would happen.

4. A successful Coup results in removes an amount of influence equal to the DIFFERENCE between the coup result and the country's doubled stability number; this ruling would have affected the games we played massively. It also makes sense--Alan and I had been triggering coups about every other turn because they way we were playing them made them far too good. We were ignoring the difference part and simply removing as many chits and adding as many as needed to meet the number rolled plus the card pitched. This resulted in things like 6 Soviet influence replacing 2 US influence in Egypt or Venezuela. Way too swingy!

That's all (for now).