|
Steven K. Mariner |
Last Updated: 18-Sep-2008 |
Advanced Civilization Write-Up: April 9th, 2005
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Attendees:
| Name | Country | Place | Points | ||||
| Dave Seeley | Crete | 1 | 4551 | ||||
| Bryan Hooker | Iberia | 2 | 4231 | ||||
| Lynn Still | Egypt | 3 | 3900 | ||||
| Annie S. Mariner | Thrace | 4 | 3757 | ||||
| Steven K. Mariner | Asia | 5 | 3651 | ||||
| Nathan Still | Babylon | 6 | 3180 | ||||
| Devan Lippman | Illyria | 7 | 3008 | ||||
| Melissa Carleo | Assyria | 8 | 2078 | ||||
| Matt Guillemette | Africa | 9 | 2030 |
Game Setup Details:
Report:
This was not a normal quarterly game; Lynn indicated an interest during the week in playing this weekend and we put out the word to the usual group. Lynn brought his son, who's been dying to learn the game, and three other people who heard about the game only indirectly asked to play and for the first time in the group's history we had more than 8 people show up for a game.
So we tried something we'd always talked about -- use all nine nations and simply use nickels for the pirate cities and pennies for the barbarian hordes. (In the end, we wound up using pieces from Age of Imperialism for the pirates and barbies.
In any regard, we scheduled for 10:30ish, with heavy emphasis on the "ish", and by the time everyone showed up it was about 11:20am. The game actually got underway about 11:45. Between all the newbies, the extra player involved, and lot of non-simultaneous movement demanded by the players, we wound up finishing the game somewhere around 3:00am the next day.
Well, we'd always wanted to see what would happen, and we did. I'm in no hurry to repeat the exercise, although as is often the case with true gamers, a few of us spent nearly an hour discussing what we'd do differently next time we had to play the 9-player variant.
It was generally agreed that we expected land contention to be the biggest issue, but we were wrong. The primary problem was trade card distribution.
Egypt built up to 9 cities and held it for four turns or so before he gave up. Most turns he was only getting 3-5 cards, because of course having 9 cities when everyone else was at 5-7, he always went last -- and with an extra player on the board, most of the card ranks were depleted by the time it was his turn to draw.
That became the recurring theme throughout the game. Some Nations (such as Africa, being early on the AST) did well with 7 cities most of the time, sneaking into the 8-range from time to time, but most other nations did their best when they had 6 cities.
Counting and planning movement, population, ships to the unit was pretty critical for some nations. Asia was repeatedly exactly one unit short of being able to support the number of cities he wanted, and spent most of the game just behind where he wanted to get to for the turn.
It was fun in that the "tried and true" rules were challenged -- and in some case, proven to be faulty -- and so it was in many ways like playing a whole new game. But I like Advanced Civilization with 7 or 8 players without the western expansion, and 9, even with the expanded board, is just a bit much.
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