Enthusiasts

This session was restricted to a two player game, comprising the yellow/human charioteers Vs the Black/Hell Hounds of Chaos.

A bumpy start area sees both charioteers sustain a little damage right from the off, but before long they are trundling along nicely at a steady lick of around 3 Whip cards.

A lot of blocking by the yellow chariot keeps the black chariot in check for the first quarter of the track. That is until the black chariot gets irate with the constant blocking and decides to get a little rough, fiercely ramming yellow at every available opportunity.

Eventually yellow gets taken off the track due to a brutal two set Whip attack, and loses out on a few rounds of distance whilst repairs are administered.

Slowly but surely black makes a large gap between him and his opponent, and by the time yellow gets back on circuit black is almost onto the second straight.

Yellow quickly lashes his beasts back into action, spurred on by a Hasten spell. The track now opens out nicely in front of him with barely any hazards between him and his rival.

Black on the other hand faces a tough decision, plough over the next couple of rock littered tiles and take his chariot close to breaking point, or stop and repair? If yellow is to so much as cast a Fireball at the chariot it will be shattered, so wisely black stops and repairs his chariot.

Yellow catches up and casts a Teleport spell to clear one of the two rock tiles. He takes a little damage and gallops onwards.

Blacks chariot returns back onto the track. Whipping his steeds he casts a Transport spell which brings both chariots nose to tail.

The speeds remain steady and low. Both players not wanting to risk any more damage than is absolutely necessary, all their concentration spent on overtaking and blocking.

Suddenly both players have the dame genius idea and begin burning through the deck as quickly as they can. Their plan - 'Discard as many cards as possible (except for a 'blue' Transport) and hope a magic Wild card gets drawn'. This happens to excellent effect and both players then spend the next good few rounds either effortlessly transporting past each other or track hazards.

Blacks luck eventually ran out, and in trailing position he draws no 'Wild' magic cards.

Yellow, having drawn some Whip cards, has to change his plan also, whipping his steeds up to a speed of 5 and simultaneously casting a Hasten spell.

The entire track is now visible.

Black speeds up as much as he can, his frothing beasts biting at the wheels of the leading yellow chariot. His discard round has given him a few decisions to contemplate. He has enough rein cards which would stop yellow making quite a strong block attempt, and enough whip cards to make a ram attack.

In a final attempt Black rams his opponent with 2 sets full of force, which Yellow takes full on the chin. Seemingly oblivious to the huge damage sustained Yellow then lays out a nice hand of 2 Rein cards, Black is now unable to match this and is driven back to the previous tile.

Black slumps back in defeat, his road rage having got the better of him. The 3 Rein cards ideally suited to match, make a simple pass, and possibly block next round.

Yellow cheekily slows his chariot down to 2, refreshes his hand to 7, and trots over the finish line as the adorning crowd showers the triumphant charioteers with a shower of roses.

I just received my copy and on my player's reference sheet there is no turn sequence. Or do I miss a reference sheet?

I uploaded a variant sequence of play we used to good effect in many plays of ULTIMATUM some, oh, 22 years ago (omigod; 22 years ago). It's in the files section here.

Despite the variant's ancient vintage, I believe it still holds up pretty well in these Modern Times. It's main feature is an interactive game turn that we felt showed ULTIMATUM's best features to to their best advantage.

As I mentioned in the introductory remarks to the variant, we invariably played the game 3-player, so we always used a spare set of pieces to represent a passive neutral. I didn't include our setup rules for the neutral in the variant file, as they required a bit of component prep (a deck of 37 cards, one for each nation on the board) and a neutral wouldn't be needed when four or more play. If anyone is interested, I can post them in the variant section.

[This review is after just one play, but I really don't see my rating changing for this game. I started writing this as a session report, but by the time I finished it I realized I had just written a review, so with a few changes, here it goes]

Tribune: Primus inter Pares. It could've been named Tribune: Worker Placement, Set Collection, Hand Management. Hm, maybe that's what the latin stands for. I remember hearing in college that latin tends to be a concise language, so...

After my two gaming buddies explained the game to me, we got going. I was the only one of the three that hadn't played it before, but the other two had only played it once, so there wasn't that big a gap between the players. Knowing the game helps(as it should), but the game's mechanics are so familiar that I didn't have a hard time grasping what to do and when to do it. I actually lost because of a stupid slip: forgot to place a worker to try to take over the purple girls when I had all the cards I needed to do so. My mistake cost me a lot: I would've been the only one with the victory conditions and would definitely be the winner. One more turn, and a failed attempt at getting laurels later, I didn't even meet the criteria (while the other two did) in the next turn, since I lost control of the blue dudes (predictably) and wasn't able to get a hold of a Tribune tile with the purple girls. We still did the scoring, and in case I did meet the criteria, I would've tied in first place. Of course, I would've been the sole winner if I had fought for the purple girls when I had to, but oh well.

The game looks great, usual awesome-metallic-looking FFG standard. The chariot's quite the overdone little bit, but other than that everything's fine.

The thing that really bugged me is how generic this game is. Really. I mean, this is the guy that made Die Macher? I love that game not only because it plays great, but it plays unlike any other game I've got the chance to play. Looking at his other games here on the Geek (Extrablatt, was sticht? and the hilariously named "kunst stucke"), I thought that to him originality was a big deal. Now it seems like it isn't.

It's not a bad game, of course. I definitely was entertained while I played it, it had some interesting decisions, nice interaction, but aside from the clever two-player auction where the winner pays the loser (which is just 1/7th of the "city board"), I've pretty much seen all of this before. Had this been published a few years ago, or outside a already-saturated eurogame market, I could see me getting excited about this game. I almost bought it without playing it just because it was "a new game by the Die Macher guy" (and, like I've often stated here on BGG, with int'l shipping and import taxes games here end up costing 3x as much); right now, I'm just glad one of my friends here in Brasília bought it. I'll get the opportunity to play it once or twice a semester, which for me will be sufficient.

If you don't care about lack of originality and you like worker placement, by all means grab this, you'll be happy with it. Me? I enjoy it when I actually feel like I'm playing a new game when I get to play a new game, so I feel absolutely no need to add it to my collection, even though I'll still say yes when somebody suggests it. My tentative rating for this (remember, I've only played it once) is a 7.5, which right now does seem like a lot after all this complaining about unoriginality, but this still is a balanced, fun and engaging game. Just like a lot other euros I've played before.

There will be another high-profile Man vs. Machine match, this time between Kim MyungWan, a young Korean 8 dan professional, and MoGo, the French Monte-Carlo program. The interesting bit is that MoGo will be playing from a 3000-processor cluster in Amsterdam.

The game will be played on 19x19. First a few quick games will be played to establish an appropriate handicap, then there will be one "serious" match.

The event will be on Thursday, August 7, at 1:00 PM Pacific time, in the Computer Go room at KGS.

(Source: Peter Drake's mails to the Computer Go mailing list)

Is this awesome or what? Now we'll find out just how well MoGo scales on 19x19...

I have noticed that people have various boards you can use instead of the TTR with new maps and tickets. What is the best way to go about making the board? I know that you print them out on 8 sheets of paper but how do you actually put the board together? Have you been able to do this in a decent manner so it doesn't look as homemade? Any suggestions? I know that you can go to plaincards.com to make the tickets which can make them decent but not the board. Any suggestions from others who have made extra boards?

The blue car and the red car had a race (or so the song went, something like that). Anyway blue Vs red it was to be.

The game began with both vehicles picking up a can of the precious gazzoline early on. Then as is usual with our games of Wreckage speed over common sense soon took over, and both vehicles found themselves leaving the 'Fuel Zone' way behind (thanks to a large floor play area).

Eventually a couple of hairpin turns that caused a little vehicle damage brought the cars more or less back on course.

Now the two cars were heading back towards each other and picking up speed yet again. Blue decided to use the fitted Turbo to ram into red but misjudged the direction of travel. The sudden burst of speed sending his vehicle just past red.

Red slowed down, trying to get a few 45 degree turns in, and eventually slowed down to a halt. Blue was quicker at turning and took the opportunity to fire a massive rocket into the back of red.

The red vehicle received major damage resulting in the removal of its ability to decelerate. At speed 2 and on the outer edge of the fuel can zone the vehicle had no alternative other than high tail it to safety and circle the outskirts of the play area whilst repairs were decided upon!

This left blue with just enough time steadily mop up the next 2 gas cans, whilst red cruised around the edge of the arena.

Does this game will be ready to Essen 2008 ?
Can you tell us about it ?

For a while I've been thinking about designing and releasing a little expansion for UR, for its small niche of passionate gamers :D. Different ideas have come to my mind, but I would like to know: who would actually be interested in such a thing? And what aspects of the game (other than the ruleset) would you like to be fixed or improved? Let me know.

I am thinking about a very small print run by now, probably handcrafted.