Re:[piecepack] Session Report - Hanging Gardens and New City

["Rob LeGood" <rflegood@...>]

Wow.  I am behind on emails.  Almost completely missed this!

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Iain Cheyne" <news@...>
"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."

Thanks for the great comments!  Nice to hear that people are still dusting
this one off!  The rules, (as I'm sure most of the others that submit
entries can attest to) are perhaps the hardest part of getting a submission
together. Mine took a couple weeks on constant tweaking.

When reading rules myself, I learn best by using real examples, which is
probably why you see that throughout the rules.  It also a preference of
mine to keep the rules tight expanding, if needed, with examples so that in
future plays (when needing to simply remind yourself how the games goes)
it's a quicker read

In fact, not long after the competition another member of the community
created an excellent one page summary of the rules, which I believe is
posted in the files section.

The FAQ was pretty much in direct response to the questions I got from the
judge, so I decided to include them there for clarification. (ie. I didn't
it added anything including them in the actual ruleset as I felt these were
just rules that were easily missed in a first readthrough.)

Still, if you have suggestions on how to improve the verbiage, I'd be open
to them.  Feel free to send me an email with your suggestions.

"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."

I think the important lesson that should have been learned after this game
is to not let this situtation happen.  (I did some quick analysis of opening
positions and found that if everyone got one tile in the first round,
everyone will be in roughly the same position in round 2.  Letting someone
grab two tiles in the opening round is an almost impossible situation and
people should be bidding to prevent this!)

I am interested in hearing what happened that caused one player to get two
tiles in the first round. Do you remember the specifics?  (Just wondering if
there's a hole in the opening bidding sequence)

"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. "

You'll be amused to find out that the version of New City submitting for
judging used the left over pieces (the null tiles and the dice) to create a
counter that kept track of everyone's gold.  It made it more portable, but
it was also a little convoluted, so I replaced it with coins. (I could send
you the rules if you'd like) Alternately, pen and paper might work too for
you.

"Despite these quibbles, New City is now my second favourite
piecepack game."

Thanks again for the wonderful comments.  I'm guessing we're all going to
find some new favorites once the games from the latest competition are
posted!