Three for two

Age of Empires III for two players again that is.
Crabro and I had another very enjoyable game of the so-called "Glen Drover's Empires: The Age of Discovery" and for some reason found it very satisfying.

I'm not sure what it is about this type of game (worker-placement) that I like, but happily Crabro feels the same way. In my case, the warmth I feel for this box of goodies is probably helped by the fact that I haven't lost to Crabro yet and this time it was quite a convincing winning margin.

After lunch, things went a little downhill as Crabro had brought with him a game he has been waiting for for some time: Ys. Unfortunately, just as we have both taken whole-heartedly to AoE3, we were equally unanimous in finding Ys a chore that we weren't going to wish to undertake again.




It's hard to say why we took such an instant dislike: It comes with little bags full of coloured gems and has an unusual an interesting mechanism involving coloured wooden cylinders with a number ranging from 0-4 on one end. These are placed as bids, some face down, some face up, in various areas of a pie-chart city map. It is unavoidable that board games (other than pure story-telling or party games) are going to have to have a foundation of mathematics. In some ways my enjoyment seems to depend on how well this is concealed beneath the theme and novel mechanisms. In this case the maths was showing perhaps a bit too much.

In the two-player game, a dummy player is added (we tend to call these Dirk after the dummy in Dirk Henn's Alhambra). In this case Dirk gave us a sound thrashing but to my surprise I came a clear second when my impression had been that Crabro was placing his pieces much more wisely.

A very good morning but an afternoon which, while still pleasant, could perhaps have been better spent with a different game. Ys it seems is destined to move on from Crabro's collection very quickly.