Games Session
|
|
| Date: |
29th October 2004 |
| Game Played: |
Mall World |
|
|
| Players |
Result |
Win |
Ratings |
| Nige |
46 |
P |
6 |
| Mark G |
41 |
|
6 |
| Mark K |
38 |
|
5 |
| John |
38 |
|
6 |
| Garry |
38 |
|
6 |
This week, I was back from Essen with a
stack of new games to play. One of the games getting good initial reports
was the latest from Andrea Meyer, about developing a shopping mall. Five
of us met at John's house to give it a try.
The idea of the game is to make money
by building stores within the mall in the best positions, as dictated by
the order cards. These orders are either Use orders which state that
certain store types need to be adjacent to other types (such as clothing
shops next to hobby shops) or Rent orders. Each store type can be rented
to a vendor who targets one type of consumer (men, women, teenagers or
kids) - so Belt & Button sets up clothing stores targeted at men. The
Rent orders then reward setting particular vendors next to each other
(Belt & Button next to Skateman - a sports store targeted at
teenagers). The gameplay involves taking an order card from four
available; then either confirming an order by placing it on the table in
front of you or offering up to 3 Approval cards for auction. These cards
allow the winning bidders to reserve a site within the mall for a
particular store type or buy up a site of the correct type for a
particular vendor. The cash paid for these cards will either go to the
auctioning player or the slush fund. Once this has been dealt with,
players can change cards no longer playable, restock their hand by two
cards (up to a maximum of 8) and, distribute the content of the slush fund
if sufficient money has been paid into it.
Play continues in each round until a
certain number of orders have been confirmed, at which point players
receive income from the confirmed orders they have in front of them. The
game ends after three rounds or earlier if all the vendors have been
placed in stores within the mall. Whoever has the most cash wins.
The game looked pretty good but our
attempt fell a bit flat. Nige decided confirming an order on every turn
was the winning strategy (where possible) and this was repeated by
everyone else except me. Consequently, while I was trying to place store
types and vendors to best suit my order cards later in the game, other
players had their order cards down quickly, ending the round before I
could get mine down. Now I'm sure if everyone had not followed the Nige
strategy, the rounds would have lasted longer, enabling longer term
strategies to work, but it certainly hampered my position in the first two
rounds. I caught up a bit in the third round but not enough to catch Nige
and Mark G. I hope this isn't a killer strategy and, on hearing some of
the favourable comments from those at Essen, I suspect it's not but it
certainly dampened our ratings of the game. This was a shame because the
theme certainly appealed to me. We'll have to try again soon.
