Gaming Recap - Azul, Plague and Pestilence, Euphoria, and Via Nebula
I thought I'd try something new and do a recap of games I've played recently. It seems the most popular posts I share are my Armada fleet lists and my Armada tournament reports, so I thought this might garner some interest because it'll be written in the vein of the latter!
Class is in session, friends!
Player count often dictates what my friends and I even consider bringing to the table. Additionally, we know each other well enough to know what we all like, what games we're likely to enjoy, and what games are on each other's "still need to play that" lists. Knowing there would be 3 of us, including me, I brought Boss Monster, Euphoria, and Vast: the Mysterious Manor. My friend Ted had brought several games, and Roger had his game library at our disposal. Ted mentioned he had brought Azul, and given the game's wild popularity, it had been on my "to play" list for awhile. Roger and I decided that since Ted is good at teaching games in a succinct way, we'd finally get around to learning it.
It was fun! If you're unfamiliar with the game, you're basically drafting tiles in order to build a little tableau on your board and score points based on what tiles are placed where. Because you score the game as you play, the upside is that you can make tactical adjustments as you play in order to improve your overall strategy. The downside of that is it's easy to miss points while tallying them if a player is new and doesn't fully understand how it works. That was me: for a couple of rounds, I scored only adjacent tiles and not other tiles that were connected in an adjacent way. In other words, I was shorting myself. Unfortunately, I couldn't go back and figure out what I had missed, but since I had a pretty good run of tiles, I was confident I'd missed anywhere from 2-4 points. Which ended up being relevant, as I ended up losing by 1 or 2 points! By the time the finals were tallied and Ted won, he was confident that I'd actually won because of my scoring error, and so handed me the "official win." I'm not proud; I took it. My experience with games is I can often win the first time I learn, but then, I get too tricksy and clever for my own good, and spend a lot of time losing until I get a better handle on why I won the very first time I played. It's a dumb process for learning games, but I'm used to the losing.
It was at this point that we were chatting and catching up, and Roger revealed he had tracked down a copy of Plague and Pestilence! At the price for which he got it, we were floored at the condition it was in! I've only ever seen it for as low as $100 and as high as $195. These cards are in crazy-good condition; I still can't get over the shape they're in!
Anyway, it took me a little reading to remember the exact rules, but it's such a simple, straightforward game, and it was such a gaming staple for our group in Buffalo, NY that it took no time at all to get going. Roger was going on and on about the intricacy of the art, and honestly, I'd forgotten just how good this game looks! So we played. Each player has a pile of people in their city (Population Points, or PP), and in the beginning of the game, the prosperity phase, everyone is basically stockpiling in preparation for the second and last part of the game, the plague phase. In the prosperity phase, each player rolls up two dice at the beginning of their turn to determine how many PP they gain, draws a card, and plays a card. That's their entire turn. At some point, the plague ship card is drawn and played. That point, the discard pile is shuffled into the draw deck, and the plague phase begins. During this phase, the game plays the same way, except dice rolls determine how many PP you lose at the beginning of your turn. My rolls to gain population points were pretty good, and I was drawing improvements to buff my rolls and defenses against sabotage from other players. Honestly, I thought I had this one in hand. I spent most of my time tagging other people for PP losses, but overall, felt good about where I was. But I also underestimated how many PPs Roger and Ted had. See, PP come in denominations of 5, 10, and 50. Part of the game is finding a good opportunity to exchange some of your PP cards for a 50. It makes your stack look shorter and people underestimate how many PP you have in reserve. Finding the right moment when the other players are too busy to notice is part of the game. Apparently, we all did it well because nobody saw anybody else pull the swap. So Roger went out first, but unexpectedly had a 50 in his stack. I thought I had Ted dead to rights, but then HE pulled a 50 out of his stack for change. I was the last one to change in, but then Ted pulled a Pied Piper card, which allowed him to draw 15 PP off of me in one turn. My rolls were high in the prosperity phase, gaining me a lot of folks, but those high rolls continued into the plague phase, losing me a lot of folks. It was close, but the Pied Piper made the difference and Ted was the last man standing.
Anyway, it took me a little reading to remember the exact rules, but it's such a simple, straightforward game, and it was such a gaming staple for our group in Buffalo, NY that it took no time at all to get going. Roger was going on and on about the intricacy of the art, and honestly, I'd forgotten just how good this game looks! So we played. Each player has a pile of people in their city (Population Points, or PP), and in the beginning of the game, the prosperity phase, everyone is basically stockpiling in preparation for the second and last part of the game, the plague phase. In the prosperity phase, each player rolls up two dice at the beginning of their turn to determine how many PP they gain, draws a card, and plays a card. That's their entire turn. At some point, the plague ship card is drawn and played. That point, the discard pile is shuffled into the draw deck, and the plague phase begins. During this phase, the game plays the same way, except dice rolls determine how many PP you lose at the beginning of your turn. My rolls to gain population points were pretty good, and I was drawing improvements to buff my rolls and defenses against sabotage from other players. Honestly, I thought I had this one in hand. I spent most of my time tagging other people for PP losses, but overall, felt good about where I was. But I also underestimated how many PPs Roger and Ted had. See, PP come in denominations of 5, 10, and 50. Part of the game is finding a good opportunity to exchange some of your PP cards for a 50. It makes your stack look shorter and people underestimate how many PP you have in reserve. Finding the right moment when the other players are too busy to notice is part of the game. Apparently, we all did it well because nobody saw anybody else pull the swap. So Roger went out first, but unexpectedly had a 50 in his stack. I thought I had Ted dead to rights, but then HE pulled a 50 out of his stack for change. I was the last one to change in, but then Ted pulled a Pied Piper card, which allowed him to draw 15 PP off of me in one turn. My rolls were high in the prosperity phase, gaining me a lot of folks, but those high rolls continued into the plague phase, losing me a lot of folks. It was close, but the Pied Piper made the difference and Ted was the last man standing.
Way to go, Ted!
The mark of a great game: simple, but fun, and left us talking about it afterward. Great stuff. We played Euphoria next, as I really enjoy the game, and Roger had been wanting to learn it for awhile. I had renewed interest in it since playing against the automa during the pandemic, so we broke it out.
I learned awhile ago that, for me, the hardest part of the game is being able to look forward while also looking back. The balance is important. It's a worker placement game and it's actually decently straightforward. However, the board itself is so busy (pretty, but busy!) that it can be easy for a player to go down a rabbit hole of considering options they can't take rather than the ones they can. So they plan too far ahead (having only one action per turn, for the most part), those plans get scuttled, and now they need a new plan, but cannot adapt quickly enough. It sometimes feels like being run over by a train you never saw coming, and each time you try to get up, the next car hits you and knocks you down again. The key for what I said about "looking forward as well as back" is the markets and their construction. See, when a market is constructed, anyone who didn't contribute ends up taking some sort of penalty. Sometimes, those penalties aren't so awful given the context in which you're working (every time you roll a 2 on a worker, you need to give up a resource, but you're resource rich, so who cares?). Sometimes, though, they're crippling (you cannot visit any Icarite territories, thus blocking off an entire 1/4th of the board until you resolve this). So the balance is making sure you're contributing to at least some markets, and are in a position to put your star tokens on the markets whose penalties are most relevant to your plans so you can mitigate those penalties. It's not an easy balance to strike! So I think the game isn't terribly complicated to learn, but it can be tough to master that balance. Unfortunately, Roger found himself out fairly early, so it turned into a race to ten VPs between Ted and myself. Ted thought he had one more turn than he did to contribute to a market that was penalizing him, and I took advantage. I had plans to contribute to a constructed market, as well as simply use another market that was already present because I had the artifacts I needed. I had gone all in on leveraging my Wastelander recruit and the Wasterlander tunnel because I was the only one with a Wastelander. Fortunately, I was able to count on Roger and Ted pursuing the Icarite allegiance track so I could flip my Icarite recruit. Then I got lucky and drew into an Icarite recruit decently early in the mid-game when I resolved my ethical dilemma and chose to gain a new recruit (there was still some time, as I think we maybe only had 4 or so stars on the board at that time, so I wasn't in a rush to get just one more star; that early in the VP race, it usually pays to pick up a new recruit instead of one VP). That incidentally scored me another VP because of the Icarite allegiance track. It was a close race with Ted, but once I had that step on him, he couldn't hope to catch me.
We decided to end the night by playing Via Nebula.
It had been on my list for awhile because I've spent the past couple of months looking closely at pick up and delivery game archetypes because I'm currently working on developing my own (hopefully more on that in the coming weeks as I get closer to finishing my prototype). I don't remember as much about this game as I'd like, so I won't be giving as much of a play by play. Roger and I tied for the win, but the one thing that really slowed me down was figuring out how to move resources from place to place, because I kept thinking I could and learning they were blocked by other resources or something. It's really not a lot to keep track of, to be honest, and Ted did a good job of explaining it (as it was his game, so he taught us), but for some reason, it wasn't quite sticking in my brain. So I was coming up with ways I could move goods that didn't actually work, and that cost me some actions and resources needlessly. I will say this: I ended up picking up The Mayor (I think) card because it would give me 2 points for every 2 pointer card I built. I figured it was a good investment. Then the 2 pointers dried up and I thought that was it for me and I'd just be bringing up the rear. As it turns out, even just a couple of 2 pointer buildings (I had 3, I think?) ended up being enough to really add to my score. I enjoyed it and want to get back to it, but yeah, don't remember much about this one. Admittedly, we started it around 1am, I believe, so there's that to consider...
It had been on my list for awhile because I've spent the past couple of months looking closely at pick up and delivery game archetypes because I'm currently working on developing my own (hopefully more on that in the coming weeks as I get closer to finishing my prototype). I don't remember as much about this game as I'd like, so I won't be giving as much of a play by play. Roger and I tied for the win, but the one thing that really slowed me down was figuring out how to move resources from place to place, because I kept thinking I could and learning they were blocked by other resources or something. It's really not a lot to keep track of, to be honest, and Ted did a good job of explaining it (as it was his game, so he taught us), but for some reason, it wasn't quite sticking in my brain. So I was coming up with ways I could move goods that didn't actually work, and that cost me some actions and resources needlessly. I will say this: I ended up picking up The Mayor (I think) card because it would give me 2 points for every 2 pointer card I built. I figured it was a good investment. Then the 2 pointers dried up and I thought that was it for me and I'd just be bringing up the rear. As it turns out, even just a couple of 2 pointer buildings (I had 3, I think?) ended up being enough to really add to my score. I enjoyed it and want to get back to it, but yeah, don't remember much about this one. Admittedly, we started it around 1am, I believe, so there's that to consider...
So that was my game night! I liked Azul, but I'm not in a rush to get back to it because it didn't really give me anything from my gaming experience that I don't get from other games. Can't wait to get Plague and Pestilence back to the table because it's so much fun and so light, but also just great to look at. I still really enjoy Euphoria, but now that I've taught it to Roger, I'm not going to be pushing it every time we have a game night for the near future. And I really would like to get back to Via Nebula while the rules are still decently fresh in my head! Hope something here intrigued you and encouraged you to try something new; happy gaming!
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