CabinCon 2022 - Part II
About halfway through Abomination, the rest of the crew arrived and we picked up some groceries. I'd done some shopping before leaving STL, but I figured ribs wouldn't travel well, so we got those and other perishables at the grocery store. It worked out that this grocery trip interrupted the game because we had an excuse to sit on our asses and finish our game while everyone else put the groceries away. Besides, if we had contributed, the table wouldn't be clear for the next game when everyone was ready to play! Truly, we were doing everyone else a favor. I'm pretty sure that at this point, Johnny, Josh and...Mike, I think? rolled out a game, and I'm pretty confident it was Fast and the Furious. So they set up outside while Ryan, Drew, and myself broke out Five Tribes. We didn't bother playing with any of the expansions, as one of us hadn't played the game before.
I spent the beginning of the game spending A TON of money and worried I'd made a serious mistake. While I was very happy having snagged two market moves that got me Gold, Gems, Spices, and Parchment in a market full of Fakirs and Wheat, Drew was already slamming camels down on the board and I was confident Ryan wouldn't be far behind him. Honestly, getting camels on the board is probably my biggest weakness in this game.
For anyone unfamiliar with the game, I've written about it here. But in a nutshell, we're playing mancala with different colored meeple pieces and we reap different rewards depending on what color meeples we remove each turn. I love this game. I think it's so much fun and I'm happy to get it on the table whenever I have the opportunity. At the end of the game, players score how many camels they've put on the board, different meeples they've collected during the game, the amount of money they've accumulated, and a bunch of other factors. With money acting as VP, it can be easy to spend too much going after market cards or bidding high in order to take one's turn before the other players. So striking a balance is essential. I've gotten pretty good at not bidding more than I want unless I see a move I absolutely must have. But I'm usually so focused on other goals, such as buying up Djinn, pursuing more Vizier pieces, or collecting sets of market cards that I end up setting up other players to clear a tile and place their camel. Since the game ends when a player has either run out of camels or there are no more legal moves to be made, and players score points off of tiles they've occupied with camels, they're a pretty integral part of the game.
But I sorta just kept skipping those opportunities because I was focused on the market and trying to keep up with viziers. Especially because Jafar was one of the first three Djinn to drop, and Jafar significantly increases the value of viziers at the end of the game (3 points instead of 1). I knew by the end of the game that it was my market sets that would keep me in the running, but I wasn't sure exactly how it would pan out.
I doubled my efforts to get camels down on the board a couple of rounds before Drew ended the game by placing all of his. And a good thing, too, as that's basically all that saved me! You can see from the score sheet above that I really only scored in 4 categories. And while I ran away with market sets, the final money was all pretty close, Ryan annihilated us in viziers, and Drew crushed us in scored camels. I won a close game and was happy, as always, to get 5T to the table!
Next up was Samurai Spirit! I think all 7 of us played this game, but it might've only been 6. At first, I thought this was a new one for me, but once we got going, I vaguely recognized it. I was sitting at the table early, so I got one of the first picks and went with Kanbei. Turns out he's got a decent ability, but I mostly picked him because he turns into a warthog when wounded and looks cool. It's a cooperative game in which players are trying to save a village from attacking ninjas. We might've played just a little too fast and loose to start the game. And by "might've," I mean we absolutely played too fast and loose. Suf was using a character that allows him to repair fences, so we wrote off any burned fences as easily reclaimable. There were some who dissented (I wasn't one of them, if I'm being honest), but Suf's got a silver tongue like no one I've ever known, and so he did a damn good job of convincing some of us that it was almost in our best interest to burn down fences so we could better set up for victory instead of solely playing defense. He kept insisting we'd just build the fences back later. I'm guessing you can tell from the tenor of my writing that the strategy was flawed. And you'd be right on that count. As Suf almost built a single fence once. So, you know...not great for us or the people in the village.
By the time the game ended, I think we actually lost 5 different ways at once. See, players lose the game if there aren't any families left at the end, if there aren't any homes left in the village, or if any one of the players die. Well, Drew and I both died. We burned down too many houses (and would've actually lost even more houses if there were any more to burn because a bunch of ninjas had successfully snuck past us to burn down even more), and we also lost all the families to attack. So yeah, that's how that went. I had fun playing! But oh man, the chaos...In this game, players can actually lend their ability to other players. Josh's ability was to fight multiple opponents simultaneously. He never lent that ability to anybody else for the duration of the game, despite Drew's urging. Why? Because "then I can't take on multiple guys at once."
Glad we got to our first full count game with everyone!
So this is what we were dealing with...
From here, we moved into Viva Java. This was a game Josh had brought and graciously taught us. Quick sidebar: One of the things I love about CabinCon is one of the things I love about playing games with my buddy Chad: before games hit the table, at least one person has done the work to read the rules, watch the videos, and feel comfortable teaching the game the best they can. Sure, we stumble, but it's so awesome having people to teach me new games so I'm not doing all the heavy lifting just because I want to learn multiple new games. It's why I played through a couple of rounds of Oceans, Ecos: First Continent, and some others before heading out east. Anyway, Viva Java basically had me baffled the entire way. I had trouble grasping the game, so I just sort of tried to commit in one or two directions so I could see the consequences unfold and learn how to play the game that way.
I started by stealing from Josh’s roaster and decided early to research “Select” because if I can maximize that research, it gives me more PP at the end of the game. But as it turns out, we were playing on the wrong side of the score card, so I kind of committed to a path I didn't understand with a bonus in which I didn't necessarily appreciate the value. The choice to change to something else was offered to me, but I declined. It's not like I had a firm enough understanding of the game to make the change an informed one anyway, so I didn't see any reason to change. Next thing I did was to start copying what Suf was doing, which was trading in his PP (Prestige Points, I think? Effectively victory points) for RP (Research Points). He just kept trading as many as he could, but I wasn't quite so committed to such an aggressive research strategy. I didn't think it would pay enough dividends and would be a situation in which too much had been sacrificed to effectively mount a comeback. I mean, that feels like a valid assessment, right?
Yessir, I will.
I WAS WRONG. I wasn't brewing anything useful, but Suf's brews kept sticking around, and that's how he ended up winning. He ended with 28 points, Johnny with 26, Drew with 25, Ryan with 21, then Josh and I tied at 15 (but I beat him on a tie-breaker, so yay me!). There was a lot I just didn't put together about this game until the game was over and we debriefed a bit. I was just placing pieces, trying to collect the best types of coffee beans in my bag, and finally, trying to brew coffee by myself so I could pull exclusively out of my own bag. But there isn't really room for that in a 7 player game. So when I had the likes of Drew and Ryan following me to wherever I was going, then insisting on drawing more beans from their own bags, I was just kinda stuck with them.
In the game, of course. Always happy for the company of these gents. Unless they're bringing garbage coffee beans to my brews, thus eliminating any chances I have of creating coffee that's worth a damn. Bastards.
I wasn't a huge fan of the game personally, but I picked the brains of everyone else to see where I'd gone so wrong. Because I felt as though I didn't have a ton of choice as to who I brewed with, since other people followed me to where I'd gone. This is how I came to understand that the game requires more politics and tabletalk than I realized. That really screwed me when I kept getting stuck with brewing partners that didn’t match with what I had in my bag. I needed to talk more before I placed based on who was next in line, since I was almost always placing first. Glad I played it and I didn't hate it or anything, but it just isn't my cup of tea.
After this, we got into Project Elite. I was pretty tired by this point, as it was later in the evening and I'd done a lot of driving followed by only a couple of hours of sleep not that long before. But this was one game that was high on...I think it was Drew's list?...and it looked cool. Plus, it was co-op, so it felt like less of a brain drain. That said, it uses a real clock, which usually stresses me out. For instance, when I play X-Com, I really only want to play the Scientist because I understand that role very well. I don't really want to learn the other roles and screw up the team. I don't like Magic Maze because it's timed and there are players banging the table in front of you when they need you to make a move you can't see, and it's that much more stressful because of an hourglass sitting next to the board. I'm happy to watch these games be played by others! But play them myself? Generally not. But it was high on someone's list and so I was happy to play along. I hope you'll join me for Part III so you can learn what happened next!
**Also, if anyone reading this is interested in this most excellent group of adventurers and their exploits, you should check out their Twitter! They're the Champions of Valinwood!
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