by Loofish
The last week was pretty good for gaming - 12 games played in a week hasn't happened for a while, even if several of them were shorter games. Also they also all involved either rats or ships, though the former was never seen leaving the latter.Half of those plays were Michael Schacht's Rat Hot. We were at the FLGS reopening and my wife was looking at this game. I had heard the name (and I knew the designer, who I feel is generally under-rated on BGG, despite the success of Zooloretto). But I hadn't read anything about it. Well, we took a shot and bought it, and given its early plays, it was a worthy investment. My wife takes to abstract games quickly and that was true of Rat Hot as well, though she unexpectedly lost a game by having too many rats on the board. That shaped the play a little, as we were both quite laissez faire about the rats, but I particularly worked to keep the pests under control and it worked quite well in putting me in a good position for a win.
The game was already moving up in my estimation, but there was a further development. After my wife lost the next game we played due to rats, she actively started making it more difficult for me to splat my own rats, foregoing some opportunities to score in order to do so. So despite my pattern of trying to keep them under control, I actually lost our next game due to too many rats!
For an impulse buy, this has already been one of our favorite two-player games in quite a while.
The other rats were the plague-bearers in Rattus. I had read about this a fair bit before and was looking forward to playing it. It is probably a little loose with 2 players, but that may change as we become more proficient at inflicting the plague on opponent cubes. A pattern did seem to quickly develop where we would favor particular roles and only a couple of them would actively pass back and forth. I certainly let my wife have the King too much, though I think she initially underestimated the value of the Merchant. But perhaps not, as she triggered the end of our first game by placing her last cube successfully (and none died during the plague part of the turn). This was supposed to be rare according to the rule book, but from a cursory glance at the Rattus forum here, it is a little more common in 2-player games (and I suspect among first time players!). The second game was a little more varied and we both worked more to keep rats on population, but my wife (who has a knack for some games) still won by a large margin. Larger than the first game actually. I kept wanting there to be more rats on the board at one time, as setting off a plague with only 1 or 2 rats present was definitely hit or miss. The 10 6+ rat tokens were a bit wasted in 2-player too, so we made a pact that they would be 10 of the 12 that are removed from the game. That worked out pretty well (and there was also a lot of use of the Knight).
We enjoyed the game, the second game more, but I think it will be a good game for when we have 3 or 4.
That was all the rat-related games (though I did pre-order Mice and Mystics for a rodent trifecta). That means time for ships.
First was the current hotness that is Eclipse. My wife had been looking at the game and saw the Planta. She wanted to play them. I replied they aren't allowed in 2-player, but then I thought of a post in which someone proposed that they might be allowed if they are up against the other disallowed race, the Descendents of Draco. So I set it up.
For our game at least, it was a horrible mismatch. I (as Draco) was able to influence and use the great systems containing the Ancients without needing to get a military force first. As a result my economy was booming. My wife spread out like a weed and turned the wormholes away from my space, but by then my bonus for Ancients was going to match hers for number of systems and then I was going to add the extra points for the higher VP systems I had. Plus I had slowly built up a powerful dreadnaught blueprint, which I used to build both and took over the Galactic Center. She had built the Star Bases at the choke point and had enough materials to build a monolith or two as well, but her military might was much weaker than mine and she conceded without playing it out to the bitter end.
That put a bit of a damper of the day (and it was damp enough outside already). My wife opined that she didn't have much chance, that the explore draws had put her in a corner, that the nerfed ships of the Planta made it hard to defend herself. Then she continued, with a comment to the effect that she didn't feel much variation between the games - the details might be different but the overall arc of the game felt samey to her. I will have to catch up with her on this and see if she still thinks that or it was just grouchiness. She's a little fearful of the time commitment for a multi-player game of Eclipse though.
After discussing exploring for a while, she then suggested another space exploration game, Starship Catan. I am not a fan, feeling there are some neat mechanisms but the overall game just feels too long and too little 'mid-game' where you are starting to get things going but aren't quite pushing for the end yet. In this game, there was even less than usual as my wife got a great start, taking down pirates and colonizing away, while I wracked up a huge profit on some trade goods but otherwise scratched around. I blame the run of 3s rolled which hit her board and planet nicely but gave me nothing. Anyway, she managed to get from 9 to 12 points in a single turn (or to put another way, won the game 3 different ways) and then it was over. My opinion of the game has not improved.
Final game of this post also had ships but more the nautical, sea-faring sort. A couple more games of Fleet and my opinion of the game is improving. First game was a bit of a let down as I got the processing license and good coins on my cards while my wife had an amazing ability to be one coin short all the time. Early on she bought a Salty Captain which in hindsight was a mistake, as it took away money she badly needed to build up her fleet. I suggested another round and this time I set it up so a processing license was up first turn, determined that I was NOT going to buy it. I got a lobster license instead (straightforward card draw based on number of captains) and I was later able to get the King Crab license that played into that. My wife went for an early Inuit Fisherman as well as a processing vessel and she had a pretty good thing going too. Again she seemed to get the 1 coin cards problem, but she got a premium license too so it was not all that bad. However I had built a steadily increasing fleet (spurning several chances to buy licenses in order to do so) and that scoring from my boats was my margin of victory.
That it was possible to not only do OK but well without a processing license was a big relief to me (though part of me knew it was true) and the addition of fishermen and salty captains added a nice dimension to the game and gave us more to think about. That it packs it into a short little game makes this a keeper for me. My wife is still grumbling about her cash flow though.