Gaming Friday

[quarrel]

Shaterri and I arrived just in time to watch the tail end of a two-player game of CanCan, an abstract tile-laying color-matching game. A tile is only legal if matching colors touch on all sides. Players start with equal numbers of tiles and get to play up to four a turn, plus possibly more if they match adjacent shapes. Whoever’s played the most tiles when all legal moves are exhausted wins.

With that trial game done, all four of us tried a round, all stumbling through the minimal rules and formulating piece-laying strategy on the fly. It ended in a three-way tie for first place with Shaterri stuck well behind with a big handful of unplayed tiles. A big part of that was getting the rules explained piecemeal.

Second on the schedule was To Court the King. It’s a dice-rolling economy-building game. Players start with three dice and try to roll various combinations to buy assistants that give them more dice or adjust their rolls, which in turn lets them afford better assistants, and so on up to the King himself. Once the King is bought, the winner is whoever has him after one final round of attempted stealing.

Orbus had a chance to go for the King early, which requires a seven-of-a-kind, but opted instead to spend six-of-a-kind on the General and gain two more dice. On his next turn he rolled an amazing nine 6s and scored the King. We called the game right there. Stealing the King was impossible. It takes at least a ten-of-a-kind to beat nine 6s and the best of us had only eight dice and no way to gain two by next turn.

It’s a confusing game with a slow learning period despite how simple its rules and components are. You need to know what everything does to plan a long-term strategy, and that’s hard to learn when the rules and all the reference cards are full of unfamiliar shortcut symbols and are printed in tiny lightweight type on a dark textured background. Also, being an economy-building game, it seems to suffer the main inherent flaw of that genre: leads tend to magnify. In fact, the rules deliberately exacerbate this. There are fewer copies of each assistant than there are players. If you’re unlucky enough to be the last player to afford a strong card, you’re not only already behind, you can’t even buy one and have to make do with something else. There’s a solid core idea here, but it’s surrounded by flaws.