GNN 2005.06 Session Report

From GTF

Game Night North v2005.06

Sep 14th, 2005
Host: JeffL
Guests: JimG, JeffL, Troy and Kieron

JeffL hosted this month. He and his wife were wonderful hosts. We had the usual pizza and pregame chatter. Wallenstein was picked as the game for the evening well in advance, cutting down on pre-game discussions of what game to play.

Everyone had also read the rules, the combination of the two cut at least 30 min out of down-time - a very good thing!

Wallenstein

Wallenstein is played over a 2 year period, with a game turn for each season within a year. Therefore, the total number of game turns is 8 (2 yrs x 4 seasons). The game mechanics are fairly straight forward. With 5 players, all of us new to the game, we played in 3 hours. I suspect with experienced players, you might be able to reduce this to 2-2.5 hrs. One additional thing that we did which surely sped up game play is to use the "newbie" setup option. A normal game has each player pick where his troops will be place. With the "newbie" option, the documentation tells you were to place all the troops, thus speeding up the setup phase.

Given this was our first exposure to the game, don't take this as the rule, but it appeared that players who avoided major conflicts seemed to fair better. We saw a few major battles take place with a large mass of troops clashing and the result was annihilation of both. Even if 1 or 2 troops suvived after the clash, the surviving player was so weak that strong neighbors could easily step in and take over the area.

It was a VERY close game for first and second (Jimbo and JeffL tied on VPs, the tie being broken by the number of palaces). Kieron came in second. The dork-tower was VERY cool.