New crack

[ciphergoth]

Fantastic weekend, thank you so much werenerd and some_fox!

I have new crack thanks to webcowgirl:

Samurai (board game)

Online play

Incidentally, it looks like we played with two small errors in the rules:

- Players are supposed to pick their starting five tiles, not draw them at random

- A player that has the majority of more than one kind of figure wins automatically

Right, I have shaved off what was starting to be a passable beard (left the shaver at home on Friday), so off to work I go.

Comments

[purplerabbits.livejournal.com]

Truly I cannot imagine you in a passable beard - there should be photos...

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Seconded!

(Is there beardiness in the air? I have an experimental prototype beard currently in public beta test. But no photos as yet.)

[slightlyfoxed.livejournal.com]

Thirded - was it shaping up to be cruel and mercurial? Or soft and saintly?

(drdoug, I really hope nobody finds bugs in your beard, even if it's not been officially released.)

[lovelybug.livejournal.com]

Very bristly!

[slightlyfoxed.livejournal.com]

Grrr. Or possibly ouch, grrrroff.

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

Very bristly!

Seconded. Though it looked cool IMO.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

heh :-) sorry to say you're not onto a winner there: that's about as beardy as I've ever been seen, despite the efforts of many to persuade me otherwise!

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

No worries; a scratchy beard isn't sexy anyway. Though most beards do end up getting softer and more lovely as they grow out.

I actually don't think you'd be improved with a beard; I just have a wicked penchant for hair of any sort, any location, any gender. Call it a fibre fetish, since I also get off on certain fabrics. It's all tactile, you know.

Samurai

[webcowgirl.livejournal.com]

I think the more than one kind of figure only happened once, the time I was playing, and I knew that meant that I won automatically but it took a while before I'd ascertained that I had in fact garnered the most items in two different categories.

RE: the picking tiles thing - I think the suggestion in the rules was that beginners do it at random, but somehow we did not transition into the advanced play mode though surely by Sunday we were ready for it!

[wechsler.livejournal.com]

The win condition for that game is extremely confusing - it almost needs a scoring app!

[babysimon]

Yes, but an app won't help. Working out who's won at the end is not the problem - the problem is trying to work out which pieces you should be trying to get to win, while playing, while you can't see anybody elses's score.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

The online game has an option to show everyone's scores - which I should probably turn on for future games, since you can go back and count in the game log in any case.

:-D

[webcowgirl.livejournal.com]

That's not the problem, that's the fun!

[phantas.livejournal.com]

if I remember correctly, it's 13 of each. 7 for sure win, 5 on a 3 people game is the minimum, 4 on a 4 people game is the minimum.

what do you mean: you are unable to memorize exactly what each of 3 people caught in each fetching?! oh that old age, you should move to Vegas...

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

The photo gallery for this game on boardgamesgeek.com includes a picture of three home-made disks each bearing a picture of one of the three figures, with "Winner" written on it. The idea is that you give these to the people who win in one of the three areas, which should make it slightly easier to see what's going on at the end of the game.

[wechsler.livejournal.com]

That's cunning.

[webcowgirl.livejournal.com]

And on the Even Bigger Game Geek website, there's a picture of the tiara you get to win when you are the overall winner, plus a list of the penalties you extract from each player during the subsequent round, including drink fetching, shoe shines, shoulder massages, and having people address you as "Oh great Samurai master ..." while they thank you for letting them place your pieces on the board.

[wechsler.livejournal.com]

Hrmm, the ink's still wet on this website...

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

And the handwriting is strangely familiar...

[zz]

misread as "drink & felching"

*blink*

[phantas.livejournal.com]

erm, but only at the end, right? others are not supposed to know (unless they have a great memory) how many you have of each during the game.

[lovingboth]

This is one of the problems with the game for me.

Reminder

[xxxlibris.livejournal.com]

Philip K Dick short stories!

[phantas.livejournal.com]

Samurai is one of those games that captures all sort of people, from gamers to non-gamers. It's a filler, of course, but a great one. Caught me completely by surprise how successful it was among my friends!

As for the rules, if you are 2 or 3 playing it's rather easy for one to get more of two and winning straight on. The scoring overall is not that complicated once you get the hang of it, it's just explained in a very complicated matter.

And, yes, you are supposed to pick your first 5 but to be honest, that only matters if you have a specific starting strategy and even there...

[postmodern-minx.livejournal.com]

I find this bickering over the rules rather dishonorable.

*makes loud throaty grunting sound*

pm