By Kathleen Donahue, Position: owner, Years working at Labyrinth: 6 years and 11 months
With the new (and hopefully improved) format of Labyrinth’s
newsletter and the reinvigoration of our blog, we wanted to start a regular
feature where our awesome employees share information about some of the games
that we’re currently playing. The staff thought I should start us off. As
usual, I’ve been playing a lot of different games. I try to play several new
games each week, and I often do not replay them, because I want to know ALL the
games. However, every once in a while there are games that catch my fancy and I
can’t stop thinking about them and I must play them MORE. This month there are
two that I just want to play again and again.
The first is Sidereal Confluence. I honestly have no idea how to actually pronounce the name of this game, but I’m completely obsessed with it. This game is complex, and there’s a chance that it may be overwhelming to someone who doesn’t have much gaming experience. Once understood, however, it is actually pretty easy to play. It is an asymmetrical trading and negotiation game for 4 to 9 players. Each player plays an alien race who must trade with others in an intergalactic trading federation to survive. The game is competitive, but it is set up so that you must collaborate with others because no race can function on its own. Pretty much the entire game is played simultaneously, so there is very little down time. You are trying to make profitable trades to earn resources to run converters to gain more resources that can then be used to develop technologies and colonize planets. The game consists of a set number of rounds, with each round being made up of a trading phase, an economy phase, and a confluence phase (where you can bid and win planets and technologies). You earn victory points in multiple ways but mostly from discovering technologies. There is a lot of engine building and resource management, but the heart and soul of the game is negotiation. I cannot think of another negotiation game that I’ve enjoyed more. I absolutely love it. We’ve played several times now, with 4 to 6 players. The game takes a while, averaging about 2 to 2.5 hours for us, but the duration is very dependent on how long you allow the negotiation phases to last. If trading bricks for sheep thrills you, but is getting a bit old, and you’re ready to settle something much larger than Catan, this might just be the game for you.
The second game that I currently can’t stop thinking about
is Raiders of the North Sea. We just got this in, and so far I’ve only played
it once. This was one of this year’s nominees for the Kennerspiel des Jahres
award (the German award for the year’s best gamers’ game). While it may also be
slightly complicated for a beginning gamer, I found it to be very straight forward
in actual game mechanics. Basically everyone starts the game with some cards
(you get 5 and must keep 3), some silver, and a pawn. BTW, they included real
metal coins which is awesome! During the game, you place the pawn on action
spaces in the town to do things like getting silver, more cards, provisions,
etc., arming your Viking ship, hiring crew, or making offerings to the chief.
If you decide to go to town, you will get two actions, one when you place your
pawn, and one when you remove a pawn from another space. As soon as you have
the appropriate provisions and crew, you can go raiding instead of going to
town. To do this, you will place your pawn on one of the raiding locations,
you’ll get plunder and a new pawn that may be a different color. Only certain
colors of pawns can be used to raid some of the locations on the board. I did
really horribly when I played this game, but I found it to be absolutely
fascinating. I loved the variation on a worker placement game, and I thought
that it really suited the theme even though, like Lords of Waterdeep, it is
mostly about the mechanics and the actions you take and the theme is pretty
secondary. As a matter of fact, this game reminds me of the feeling I had the
first time I played Lords of Waterdeep, so if you like that one, you may really
like Raiders of the North Sea, too. I’ll be playing again soon, and
hopefully, I will redeem myself as a better Viking.
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