Games Session
|
|
| Date: |
16th April 2004 |
| Game Played: |
Saga |
|
|
| Players |
Result |
Win |
Ratings |
| Mark K |
64 |
P |
5 |
| Nige |
51 |
|
4 |
| Garry |
29 |
|
5 |
| Mark G |
0 |
|
6 |
We then turned to one of the new
Uberplay small box games: this time a Wolfgang Kramer design called Saga.
The idea of the game is to battle for control of six kingdoms, through
cardplay, by building up a number of armies in competition with the other
players. Once a player has a more powerful army than the kingdom's
defensive force, that player takes control of the kingdom and his army
becomes its new defensive force. On each subsequent turn, he will receive
income for being a kingdom's defender (if he remembers to claim it). The
previous controller of the kingdom picks up the army cards previously
defending the kingdom and adds them back into his hand for use again. The
game ends once a player has no cards in his hand and points are scored
equal to the size of each defending force the player controls, plus income
collected during the game, less the value of any cards left in your hand.
This sounds fine in outline but in play
it just didn't work for us. There is the inevitable ebb and flow as
players wrest control for new kingdoms and lose others they currently
control. This means you are getting cards back almost as quickly as you
are playing them (because you can only lay one card per turn). Hence,
whenever anyone started to get low in cards, other players attacked their
kingdoms to put cards back in the hand of the player getting low. This
would have been ok if it extended the game to about 30-40 minutes but our
game clocked in at around 80 minutes and by that time we were all willing
someone to get the game over with. The most enjoyable part was whenever a
player forgot to take their income to the amusement of everyone else.
Eventually Mark K managed to get rid of his last card and turned out to
have won. The end game turned out to be disappointing as Mark K won due to
the timing of playing his last card (which he couldn't really control), as
this just happened to coincide with when I had just lost a kingdom to Mark
G which otherwise would have given me the win. A bit disappointing really
as there were some good ideas but these were lost in the poor way the game
played.
