Reply: The Castles of Burgundy:: General:: Re: What did I miss?

Thanks everyone for the varied and excellent responses!

DaviddesJ wrote:

lindyhopper wrote:
- Note that I hate, hate, hated Hansa Teutonica

Me too! But do the two games have anything in common?

Well, yes and no. While I was playing CoB, I flashed back--in a brief moment of terror--to my experience with Hansa Teutonica (fortunately, the fit subsided, and I was able to continue my play without injury).

Where they are similar, at least what made me think of it, was that the theme in Hansa T... really didn't match the game mechanisms and in many ways, the attempts in that game at theming really confused me and created this horrible dissonance between what I thought the game was about (from the theme) and how it played (from the mechanisms). It was such a horribly mismatched theme that I completely rejected the game, even though I acknowledge there's some good mechanisms in there. I just handle handle the gross thematic dissonance. It led me down the wrong path and I don't enjoy that.

Castles of Burgundy, fortunately, only triggered minor tremors due to thematic dissonance, but I thought I would mention my experience with Hansa Teutonica, as it might have explained my tastes somewhat.

rahdo wrote:

Sorry to hear that Greg. I hope I didn't steer you wrong with my vid. Out of curiosity, what range of scores did you guys get on your plays. We seem to average around the 200 mark (not sure if that's good or bad for 2p), so if you're much lower than that, you know you probably aren't synergizing well and there is strategy to pick up on (unless someone else says 200's is a terrible score :))

Re: thematic, yeah, CoB is one of his driest games, no doubt. I'd probably rate the big Felds thematic integration thusly:

1 Luna
2 Year of the Dragon
3 Macao
4 Notre Dame
5 Trajan
6 Castles of Burgundy

But they're all low, compared to, say, Agricola :)

No Richard, you didn't steer me wrong. I had already purchased Castles of burgundy before you recorded your video(s) (even before the first attempt). I was happy to see your video because it allowed me to see the flow of the game, which looked and sounded really fun when I watched it. But you add a lot of thematic flavoring and excitement in your playthroughs. That was lost when we tried to play it, cold, from the rulebook. We'd look over the board and say..."gee, I have no idea what to buy or do. Let's look up what this thing does. Ok, and what does that other thing do. Hm, I wonder how that would help me. Not sure. I suppose I could buy this other thing, that gives me points. Points are good, I'll do that." And so on. We were really fumbling around in the dark and I was a bit mad that the theme didn't help me know what to do and the 'right' moves were really not clear to us, as new players.

It wasn't a resounding failure, like our plays of Prêt-à-Porter, which we only managed to complete a single round of (and we played twice, one round each game and each time we quit in frustration). We could see that some fun might be in there, once we can choke down the effects of the buildings and what sort of combo-knowledge tiles are in there. I think our final scores were ... 160 and 145. So, well below your 200-is-par threshhold, but I as I said, we were really just playing randomly, for the most part.

We did complete the entire game, which is something that our biggest failures have not (Pret, Race for the Galaxy (didn't even make it past the rules explanation), Dungeon Petz (which I loved, but my wife snoozed after two rounds)).

We'll give it a few more goes before deciding what to do with it. I think I might try to get a play in with some experienced fans of it, so I can watch how it should work.

I brought up the initial question to try to get some thoughts on what I might have missed about the game that I should have known in order to enjoy it. For instance, one of our favorite card games is San Juan. The first few plays of it, we didn't really enjoy. And the reason was we never had any cards, it was just like running on empty all the time. In later plays, we discovered that the game is fundamentally about building an engine to get you cards, at least for the first half of the game. And if you fail to build an effective card engine, it's not really an enjoyable experience. When I teach the game, I always make a point to tell people this point and it has seemed to make the game enjoyable from the first play for them.

Thanks for the great responses. We'll give it some more plays and see if it grows on us.