Session Report - Hanging Gardens and New City

["Iain Cheyne" <news@...>]

http://cheyne.net/blog/index.cgi/board_games/ncity_hgardens.html

Hanging Gardens and New City

We have now moved to Queretaro, north of Mexico City and are staying
in a hotel. Games playing was interrupted by New Year and hangovers,
but it looks like we have a few more sessions left in us. We visited
Tula the other day, which was nice after playing the game.

We had a very successful session the day before yesterday. We first
played a three player game of Hanging Gardens and then a four player
game of New City.

After reading the rules to Hanging Gardens, I had a strong feeling
it was going to be a good game and I was not disappointed. Again it
uses an ancient world theme, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The
rules are easy to understand, although the rules for the equation
for determining line of site are a long-winded - an example would be
useful. Also, the PDF of the rules is enormous. The html version I
put on the wiki is far smaller. The mechanics are elegant and there
is plenty of skill and player interaction. Players compete in three
dimensions with terraces (tiles) and gardens (coins) to build the
Hanging Gardens and produce the best view from their gazebo (pawn).
It is now my favourite piecepack game and one of my favourite games 
of all.

New City also went down very well, although everyone preferred
Hanging Gardens. It is great that such a deep, complex game can be
compressed into the piecepack. It is an auction and tile laying game
in the classic German style. The players act as city planners
competing in auctions for different districts of a city. These are
then added to their own quarter of a city. The districts interact
with each other and produce money for the players to spend on more
auctions. After five auction rounds, the game is over and the one
with the most money wins. There is a lot of skill involved and lots
of player interaction. My only complaints are that the rules are
slightly unclear in places, as it is sometimes essential to read the
examples in order to understand what is going on. There is also an
FAQ, which should have been incorporated into the rules and the
reference sheets could be clearer. When I get home from Mexico, I
would like to redraft the rules to fix this ? with Rob
LeGood's
permission. It is also possible for a player to get entirely frozen
out of the game, if they do not buy districts in the first round. My
brother did this, was outbid for almost the entire game and only had
two districts at the end. I am not sure what could be done to fix
this, other than to advise people to get stuck in early. Finally,
New City requires some reference sheets and lots of counters to
represent money, which makes it less portable. We used small sweets
which naturally got eaten towards the end of the game by the guys
who were not going to win ? maybe next time I will use beans.
Despite these quibbles, New City is now my second favourite
piecepack game.

It was a great games session. I have converted everyone on this trip
to the piecepack. They have all separately remarked to me how
flexible and powerful it is. They are also impressed that there are
so many games and how hard-working the community is. Judging from
the reactions of these casual gamers, I am very optimistic about the
future of the piecepack.

--
Iain