Games: Pit, Intrigue, Union Pacific

Saturday, 27 November 1999

Kevin called me up last night to ask if I wanted to go out to Long Island to play games today. I was in the mood to go out and be social, so I went in to the office to meet him and we left around 2:30. I wound up playing three games:

Pit is a ninety-year-old commodities trading game, and the most exhausting board games I've ever played. Each player gets a bunch of random commodity cards and has to trade cards with other players until all of the cards in his or her card are one commodity. There's no turn structure -- players just shout out how many cards they want to trade and swap with anyone wanting to trade the same number. Whoever first gets a matching set slaps a bell that's in the center of the table, and then points are tallied. I got my butt kicked, as I'm bad at all the things that this game requires of its players.

Intrigue was also tense, but a different kind of tension. It's a German game of nepotism and bribery in Rennasance Italy. Each player has ten relatives to place in salaried positions in the households of the other players. Each player's household has room for five employees, so there are twice as many people as positions to hold them. Players encourage each other to take in their relatives through bribery, promises, and threats ("Sure, you may not want to pay me $30,000 to give your knight a $20,000 job, but I'm employing your cardinal for $100,000, and that other player might want to challenge for that position...."), with no guarantees that promises have to be kept. I did decently in this, but paid out to much in bribes and misidentified the point where being nice stopped paying off. A simple elegant game, but not for the kind-hearted. If you're the sort of game player who takes personally actions taken twoards you in a game, this is not a game for you. It's also got the prettiest money I've ever seen in a game.

Union Pacific is a game about building railroads and collecting shares. The turn structure seemed a bit complicated and counter-intuitive at first, until I picked up on its internal logic and started thinking of my options as "building" and "spending" instead of "railroads" and "shares." I started off well, then lost ground rapidly.