by Tony Boydell
Yesterday’s post-industria return to Wycombe station came earlier than I’d expected, so I waited for nearly an hour for my lift to the evening’s gaming venue: The Shire Horse on the old A4 betwixt Maidenhead and Reading (two town names that have alternate meanings – like the also-adjacent Slough and Wargrave, but not the village of Cockend). As far as I could discern, ie. nasally, the morning’s “river of shit” seemed to have been staunched (cue: further, rather uncharitable, references to Scandaroon from the cheap seats).The journey down the A404 was all-too-brief, affording Richard and myself only a few moments to bitch about Nefarious before the restaurant opened it’s rustic charms to our delectation. Talking of charms, I must admit to be taken aback, somewhat, by a hoary old business gentleman propped up at the bar talking ‘sales’ to a colleague; he was your typical 60-something executive with short-silver hair, ex-Police Officer demeanor, broken nose, bullish shoulders, two piece suit, stockings and high heels. Yes, I know it’s the “twenteens”, but please forgive an old man his detractions from the regular grind. Fair play to his relaxed and genial manner – the only other transsexual/vestite I’ve come across in recent years works at the Home Office and bounces around in the most unladylike ‘this is what ladies walk like’ manner. Of course, as I rounded the far corner of the building to find our table for the night, I couldn’t help but see Uncles Carl and Steve similarly cross-dressed in my mind’s eye – only for the briefest moment but, like Lot’s wife, my pillar is now forever salt.
We chatted for a bit, which would set the pattern for the evening: long periods of fat-chewing interspersed with the occasional game. Uncle Dave arrived shortly after us and so, with five, we set up Ginkgopolis for a second go (see a couple of weeks bag for my first impression, which was – generally – frustrated) OR (wait for it, this is a good one) as it is now known: Gink-proper-lis! (*badomp-tish*)
...yes? No?
It turns out that Dave had got a couple of things wrong in his original rules understanding gleaned from two demos at the Pearl Games stand at Essen. Well, I say “a couple of things”, but perhaps that ought to be “everything”. It seems that either the PG team were lying to him OR Dave has suffered a minor mental breakdown between then and last week: he got pretty much ALL of the rules wrong! Wrong about the drafting element, missed out the benefits of placing on a LETTER tile, missed out the cost of changing colour, missed out playing a number card to get HEIGHT x BENEFIT (if not ‘building over’) and so much (SO much) more!
Good on Mr Moss for having a go at games design but, traditionally, you need to start with your OWN game and not re-engineer someone else’s (cue: digs about what to do with 600 remaindered copies of Scandaroon).
Well, as you can imagine, mine and Carl’s perception of the game has been changed vastly – it’s clever, interactive and nowhere NEAR as random as I’d been led to believe by the duplicitous Mossy! As a form of punishment, the group decided he should be sent to the bar to relay our supper orders – a seemingly-innocuous burden, you may think, but not when the five of us are barking food and drink requests simultaneously, changing our minds halfway through and generally being arses about the whole process. As it turned out, some of our specific requests for ‘rare’ steak were roundly-ignored by the inept Chef (unless that was Dave’s epicurean revenge tic?) and my crème brulee was a little ‘funky’.
With much valuable gaming time hemorrhaging into the Berkshire night, we split into two threes: Carl, Steve and the disgraced David “Tzolk’in” (nice pun) on table 30 and me, Jimmy and Richard on Doge Ship duty in the next bay. The Calendar game got much praise indeed 90 minutes later as they packed away, everyone keen as English mustard to give it another whirl. The JAR table, in contrast, were overwhelmingly shruggy-of-shoulder about The Doge Ship.
A pseudo-Venetian precis: A number of coloured dice are rolled at the start of the round and placed on a board that shows a variety of actions (buy, build, take money, intrigue ) in a variety of combinations (gondola or barrier or Doge Ship or, more rarely, ‘and’ versions of pairs). One has five workers to place on spaces – no cost if placed prior to/on the die space (1 thru 6 in a line, one for each colour of die), or ‘the difference’ if using actions beyond the die ie. low rolls are a pain because actions on that line cost money. When built: gondolas give money (and occasionally other things), barriers give an action-modifying bonus until you build your next barrier and protect against ‘floods’ (a mechanism that can cause you to lose some workers for a round) and the Doge ship bits give you VeePees.
So far, so what – and that (apart from the nice graphics and the clear iconography/layout) is the problem. It is smooth, it’s pretty but – for us at least - a little mechanical and, definitely, over-long (90 mins is too much). When you consider the Tzolk’in game completed 10 minutes after we did (and we all started at the same time), I cannot see why I’d ever table The Doge Ship over cog-madness (or many old favourites that play in the same time like – ooh – Agricola, Dungeon Lords, Goa, Suburbia, Keyflower, Lords of Waterdeep, multiple Glories to Rome etc). The Doge Ship is perfectly fine but not for our group and it’s demands.
We dithered out the remaining 45 minutes with some (extra) creamy puddings what I went and ordered - then split the £140 (!) bill six-ways (so much for the 20% off voucher - 20% off up to a max of £16) and scattered homeward. Another week whistles by...