Important Technique! Also: Mini-reviews.
Posted by Rob Herman at October 9th, 2007
To decide who goes first:
- Pick a spot on the board
- Grab a marker from every player and drop them all on the board
- Closest marker to the designated spot goes first
Mini-Reviews:
Vikings: Lots of fascinating, quirky, novel mechanics. The trouble is I think they have all been added together to come up with a very ordinary game. Verdict: 2+. I would play again.
Conquest of the Fallen Lands: Neat mechanics in a solid, elegant game. I see a big flaw in that it can be possible for a player to get “stuck” with little to do for many turns at a time. I would feel uneasy about demoing it to new players for this reason. Verdict: 2+++. Would definitely play again, but someone else has to take the blame for suggesting it.
Quo Vadis? The name means “Where are you going?”, evidently a Biblical allusion. “Whither I go, thou canst not follow me now; but thou shalt follow me afterwards.” Negotiation is the heart of the game, and for such a game, it plays very quickly. There’s opportunity for treachery and betrayal, but it doesn’t seem to be integral–our winner won without it. I suspect it has great value as an icebreaker or to play with new folks, but less replay value than most games. Verdict: 2++.
Pick a spot on the board
Grab a marker from every player and drop them all on the board
Closest marker to the designated spot goes first
That sounds vaguely similar to Clout. This is not a good thing. Well, except that yours is just to see who goes first, and Clout based the entire game on that concept.
When dice aren’t handy, I usually choose the first player by a generalization of evens/odds: for N players, everyone shoots 1-N fingers simultaneously; add them up; reduce mod N; count that many players from a predetermined starting point (generally, myself); that player goes first.
That looks fast and slick and I’ll have to give it a try. Never let it be said that I have turned down an opportunity for modulo arithmetic.
That seems to take one more step than my ‘drop a pen’ technique, wherein I drop a pen on it’s butt, and whoever it points at
diesgoes first.