Great Canadian Board Game Blitz: Toronto - 2011 Recap

Yesterday was the Toronto GCBGB event held in the back room of a pretty nice pub in downtown Toronto. It was definitely a fun time with a lot of new faces in attendance. Overall 21 people showed up to play at some point during the day with a couple people only playing a few rounds. One change to the format this time is they didn't run any 5 player games. I believe the reason was time concerns (many games just take 25% longer with 5 people instead of 4) though I think for scoring purposes it's pretty bad too. Of course with 21 people we ended up playing a lot of 3 player games which have scoring concerns of their own. Oh well. Off to the games!

Round 1 - Bohnanza, 7 Wonders, Carcassonne, Wizard, Dominion, San Juan

I was randomly assigned to pick 5th. We had 18 people to start off so we were going to be playing 3 4-player games and 2 3-player games. When it was my turn to pick I could still pick any game I wanted so I went with San Juan. It is both the game I'd enjoy playing and the game I think I have the best chance of winning so it was the obvious choice. We ended up being one of the 3 player games. A 19th player showed up just before the game start and he chose to join the other 3 player game instead of ours so we were the only 3 player game in the round. One of the other players had played before, the other hadn't. In fact, the guy who had played before was in my game of San Juan last year too. He seemed vastly improved from then when I think he was pretty new to the game.

The game opened with righty going first and building. I played a tobacco storage. I never crafted or sold myself and it remained my only trading related card for the game but just having it in play meant I wasn't falling behind when they were crafting and selling either. I followed it up with a carpenter, a cycled archive, and then a quarry. With the purple building combo in play I went into playing lots of purple buildings and actually ended up building almost all the good ones. Chapel, then library, then prefecture. I didn't end up with a large building but I did build all 3 statues as well as putting 6 cards under the chapel. I ended the game and was multiple buildings ahead of the other players, I think. One had a zumft hall with a good selection of production buildings but it wasn't quite enough as I won by 7.

Round 2 - Alhambra, Ra, Roll Through the Ages, Saint Petersburg, Medici, Glen More

This round featured 2 games I've never player before, one I've played exactly once, and one I really dislike. Picking 5th last meant I might have been in a bad spot but fortunately one of the two games I like and know was still available. I hadn't played it in like 2 years (since WBC2009 I think) but figured I could pick it back up again. The game was Saint Petersburg and featured 2 new players, myself, and the guy from San Juan who seemed like he really knew the game.

I opened up in the noble seat on the first turn and we ended up only taking 1 building off the board in the building phase. That meant I got the only noble on the first turn which was a pretty big boost to my game. I then managed to manipulate the board such that we'd get 6 workers on the second worker turn when I happened to be 2nd. Those two things combined meant I was making 15 gold a turn compared to 12, 9, and 9 from my opponents. After another turn I pretty much stopped generating more income and focused exclusively on victory point buildings, managed to snag the 7 point per turn building pretty early on. I ended up winning very handily 84-65-58-55.

Round 3 - Ingenious, Ticket to Ride, Two by Two, Ticket to Ride: Europe, Thurn and Taxis, Yspahan

I got to pick first in this round which seems like it should be good. Unfortunately there isn't a single game in this selection that I both know and tolerate. If I'd been thinking ahead I would have played some T&T on BSW last week to refresh myself on the game so I could have played it. I don't really like the game though, and since I didn't know it either I stayed away. I ended up picking Ticket to Ride which is the only game from the set that I thought I knew.

I was doing pretty well for myself in the game and was in a good position near the end of the game. I counted my cards in hand and trains left and figured out I could end the game in like 3 actions. Instead I went for more tickets. Now, I had 6 yellow cards in hand and was connected to the 6 yellow and the 5 yellow so I had a pretty good chance of pulling a ticket near my track worth a fair amount. Observant people will note I said I had 6 yellow in hand and there was still a 6 yellow track in play. I could have taken it and ended the game in 2 turns. That seems strong. Instead I went for tickets. One I could do trivially, building just one 3 track. Great! Then there was another I could do with the same 3 track, and the 6 yellow, and a singleton. I decided to keep it as well despite knowing fully well that I could have ended the game in 3 turns and therefore someone else probably could have too. (One guy built a bunch of 6s and didn't go for tickets ever either, so it should have been obvious that I wasn't getting 3 more turns if he didn't want me to.) He then immediately built the 6 yellow, dropping down to 4 trains in stock. The game ended one turn later, so I both only got 2 turns and didn't get to build the 6. I ended up coming a pretty distant 3rd place. In fact I was exactly the negative point value of the route I took, so I could have tied for 1st if I'd just taken the 1 ticket. Probably I just win if I build the 6 yellow myself instead of taking tickets at all. The guy who came last was actually the guy building all the 6s. It turns out he got spited out of a critical piece of track and failed to do all of his tickets.

Round 4 - Egizia, Puerto Rico, Santiago, Stone Age, Settlers of Catan, Container

By this point we were up to 21 people so we were playing 3 3-player games and 3 4-player games. All 6 games were now included. I was tied for 3rd at this point, with Duncan. This round featured 3 games I've never played before, 2 I have played a ton but don't like, and 1 I both like and know. Stone Age time! It ended up being a 3 player game. In fact only 2 people had chosen it when the last person was to pick and she was forced to play it. Neither of them had played before but both seemed interested in playing it and both seemed like they wanted to play again later so that's good. The game itself was less good. There are things about Stone Age that you just can't know until you've played it at least once, like how to properly value the different cards. I ended up winning by over 100 points.

Round 5 - Agricola, Power Grid, Caylus, Tigris & Euphrates, El Grande, Steam

Everyone ahead of me or tied with me lost in round 4, so I was back at the top of the pack. This round had lots of interesting options, and I almost wish I was 2nd going into the round instead of 1st. Someone asked me what I'd do if I was 2nd and I said I'd go to whatever game 1st picked (unless they picked the one game I didn't know). Sadly no one else seemed to feel that way as the top 6 all chose a different game. As for what I was going to pick, well, Steam was out since I've never played it. I think El Grande is terrible with 3 players and didn't want to risk it. I just don't like Caylus and would never pick it over Agricola since I think Agricola solved the problems Caylus has. So it was down to Agricola, Power Grid, and Tigris & Euphrates all of which I like to play and think I'm pretty good at. I went with Tigris & Euphrates since I never get to play it and wanted to practice for WBC. It ended up being a 3 player game with 1 new player which was a little unfortunate. I would have prefered a 4 player game. In retrospect I probably should have gone with Agricola since I like it a lot with 3 or 4.

The game itself featured me beating up on the new player and the 3rd player building an empire with 2 monuments in it. I screwed up a blight and failed to take over one of the monuments when I really needed to, and after that failure (using my last blight) it was very hard to stop him. I managed to set up one chance where we would do an external red fight. Red was both of our lowest numbers by far and the winner of the fight was going to score up 5 or 6 red points. He ended up having enough to successfully defend (I had to attack since he was guaranteed to win since he had a red monument) and as such won by an incredible margin. 16-8-7.


Coming second in the last round meant a lot of people could pass me with a win. It turned out two people did so. Sara and Duncan. Both of whom already have passes to Fan Expo since they're volunteering for the gaming convention. So while I didn't end up actually winning (exclusively to that screw up in Ticket to Ride!) I did get the prize I wanted. And as an added bonus I got to play 2 games on Roll Through the Ages with Sara and Duncan afterwards. Fun game. I'll probably try to pick it up since it's short and similar to Ra! Dice but better.

Stone Age - Infrastructure

There are three spaces on the board which essentially allow you to acquire resources every turn for the rest of the game. Early on these spaces are awesome and you should almost always pick one of them if you can. Later on they're a little worse but still pretty good since there are ways to score points based on how much infrastructure you have. I'll discuss those in more detail when we go over scoring but for now it's just important to know that the infrastructure spaces start very powerful and remain strong over the course of the game. The three infrastructure spaces are agriculture, population, and tools.


Agriculture is the most straightforward and most intrinsically powerful of the three. You spend 1 guy now and you get to move your marker on the farm track up one space permanently. At the end of each turn you have to pay 1 food per guy you have. Farms knock one off of that cost so if you have 5 guys and 5 farms you actually don't pay any food at all. Since a food is essentially worth 2 points each you're spending one guy now for 2 points a turn for the rest of the game. The guy's action is worth 3.5 points so as long as there's even one more turn left in the game this is a positive action. The only caveat here is food is only used for eating so if you end the game with a lot of extra food they don't count for anything. This means you generally don't want to end up with as many farms as people since then you can't eat food and any food you do pick up is wasted. Ideally you want to end the game with 0 food left.


Population is relatively straightforward and has the potential to be the most powerful of all. You spend 2 guys now in the 'love shack' space and get an extra guy permanently. You start the game with 5 in play and have a hard cap of 10 over the course of the game. Note you don't get to take an action with the guy this turn but you do have to feed them at the end of the turn. (Stupid children and their insistence on being fed.) As such, the cost of going to this space is 9 points. (You give up rolling with 2 guys - 3.5 each. You also spend an extra 2 feeding the kid.) The long-term gain is you get an extra 3.5 points each turn by rolling a die with the new guy, but you have to feed him 2 points. So the net gain is 1.5 points. This is worse than agriculture by 5.5 points right now and .5 points every turn, so if you have a choice between the two then agriculture tends to be better. On the other hand if you're sucking up the 10 point penalty for not feeding your guys at the end of the turn then population is awesome. It costs 10 points regardless of how many people you don't feed, so the extra guys have no added cost and are just an extra 3.5 a turn. Since you aren't feeding then the agriculture is worth nothing. (There is a whole strategy around this which we'll flesh out in more detail later. For now just know that getting more population is key to the starvation plan.)


Tools are the hardest to work out a value for and are my personal favourite infrastructure item. The first tool you pick up sits on your board ready to be used. Then any time you roll dice to pick up resources you can 'tap' your tool to add 1 to the roll. So if you roll 2 dice on gold and they total 5 you'd get nothing at all. But if you had a tool to tap you'd instead get a full gold. Once a tool is tapped you can't use it again that turn but they all untap at the start of your next turn so you can boost one roll every turn for the rest of the game. Your second tool gets you another 1 tool so you can add 2 to one roll or 1 to two rolls. The third tool is the same as the first two. After that you no longer get extra tools but you instead upgrade existing tools to add more to a roll. So if you've acquired 4 tools you'll have a 2, a 1, and a 1. You can use them on the same roll or on different ones if you're making lots of rolls in a turn.

How much are tools worth? This is a tricky question and depends on both how many tools you have and how many things you're trying to pick up. At the simplest, assume you have 1 tool and roll 1 die on 1 resource. Then the tool is worth 1 point on average. (1/6th of the time it's worth gold or 6 points. 5/6th of the time it's worth nothing. This averages out to one point. Or if you're rolling on food, 1/2 the time it's worth 2 and 1/2 it's worth nothing.) But what if you roll a die on gold and then one on food? Well, then 1/6 it's worth 6 and 5/6*1/2 it's worth 2. So it's worth 1.83 points. In general the more different things you roll on the more chances you have to proc your tool which is awesome.

The problem though, as we discovered in the last post, is spreading out your guys is actually bad for the value of your guys. That first guy on gold is only worth 1 point himself. The first guy on food is worth 2. So with 2 guys and 1 tool you can either get 4.83 points by splitting them or 5.5 points by stacking them both on gold. (1 point for first guy on gold, 3.5 for second guy on gold, 1 for the tool.) We can make the tool worth more by splitting but our overall EV goes up by stacking.

Consider what happens if you have 4 tools, though. 2 guys on gold with 4 tools is worth a total of 8.5. But split them between gold and food and they're worth 10.3 total. It's even better with 5 tools, since then you can guarantee at most 1 pip wastage across your rolls and tools. 2 guys on gold with 5 tools is 9.5. 1 on gold and 1 on food with 5 tools is 11.5 points.

The way to minimize the random swings in the game is to stock up on tools. You'll roll some 1s and some 6s over the course of the game, and your goal is to minimize the number of wasted pips. (Roll 5 on gold with no tools and you've wasted 5 pips. Roll 6 on gold with 5 tools and you've still wasted 5 pips.) But by having enough tools to make your gold roll become "just in" and by also rolling on food you can guarantee at most 1 pip wastage. (Due to the way tools build up this isn't always true. With 6 tools, for example, an odd roll on gold and an odd roll on food is 2 pip wasteage since you can only ever add 2 to the rolls. This makes the 6th tool not very good, but you still need it to get up to 7 tools.)

There's two ways to look at it. Either the extra value gained from these tools gets counted on the tools and you need to devalue guys or the tools just smooth out your guys and push them closer to being worth their theoretical 3.5 points and tools are just worth 1. I find it easier to take the second stance when I'm thinking as I play the game, but I recognize that the first 5 tools are really critical. I hate rolling on gold without having the 5 tools, so I place a premium on picking up early tools. Having lots of tools makes everything else smoother. You can afford to throw just 1 guy on gold then and know you're guaranteed to get it when you need it. Put other guys on other spots and you can still use the tools when you roll 'lucky' with your one guy on gold. I've played games where people keep rolling their eyes and lamenting how lucky my rolls are since I always get just in on most of my rolls. What they fail to realize is I get to do this because of how many tools I have. That's what tools do!

I still take agriculture over tools first pick (if you don't then you have to dedicate a lot of guys to food every turn and just get to do less stuff) but I take tools over population until I have at least 5 tools even if the people are potentially more powerful in general. I like the smoothing affect of tools.

Stone Age - Immediate Resources

There are 5 different raw resources in Stone Age (Food, Wood, Brick, Stone, and Gold). These resources are obtained from the five spaces circles in red in the screenshot here. They're all acquired the exact same way. When you activate one of these spaces with guys on them you roll one six sided die per guy. Add up the total on the dice and divide by the value of the resource. Round down to the nearest whole number and that's how many you get. Food costs 2, wood costs 3, brick costs 4, stone costs 5 and gold costs 6. In the picture you can see that purple has 3 guys on wood and blue has two guys on brick.


We'll get to it in more detail when we discuss scoring but in general the value of the raw resources is equal to how much they cost. A wood is worth 3 points while a gold is worth 6 points, for example. Also at the start of the game you need to eat 5 food or lose 10 points and food costs 2 to pick up.

How much, then, is a guy worth? If you were able to receive partial resources then every turn every guy would be worth 3.5 points. Unfortunately any spillage is completely wasted so this is an upper bound on how much they're worth instead of an exact value. For example, the 3 guys above on wood are worth 3.1667 points each. The two guys on brick? Actually only worth 2.722 points each. A single guy on gold is only worth 1 point since he often returns nothing at all.

Remember how I said there were ways to negate a lot of the randomness in the dice? Not putting one guy on gold is a good start. In fact, while the first guy on gold is only worth 1 point every other guy on gold is worth the full 3.5. Not only does stacking guys on gold make it more likely to get the first gold which you presumably really need if you're rolling on gold at all but it increases the per guy value of the previous gold diggers.

Stone Age - Introduction

Stone Age is a German board game for 2 to 4 players. It's reasonably short and plays in about an hour and a half with the full four players. The game is a worker placement style game with a large die rolling component so a lot of people feel the game is very random. I think the game has ways for the attentive player to negate a lot of that randomness and feel a strong player will beat a weaker player practically every time. The different actions are not all of equivalent power and the different ways to score points require drastically different amount of effort. I have my own ideas for which actions to take and will be sharing those in the next few posts.

This game is available for play on BSW and the screenshots used all come from the BSW client for the game.

Each player starts the game with 5 workers and 12 food. Every turn follows the same sequence of play. The starting player picks one of the squares on the board and puts workers on that square. Some squares have a mandatory number of workers and others can take a variable number. (The specific squares will be covered in detail later.) Then the next player does the same thing. Keep going around until everyone has all of their workers on the board. Then the starting player activates all of his workers on the board. He does not have to activate them in the order they were placed on the board; they can be activated in any order. Then after everyone has activated all of their workers the turn ends. Each player must pay 1 food for each of their workers or suffer a flat 10 point penalty regardless of the amount of the food shortfall. Pass the starting player marker clockwise and start over from the top. Eventually one of the game end conditions will be met and whoever has the most points wins.

In general the actions you can take fall into one of three categories. The action either provides immediate resources, or it allows you to invest in your infrastructure to increase your resource acquisition rate for the future, or it allows you to convert resources into victory points. Investing in the future tends to be very good but some of the scoring cards are much better than others and you need to know when it's right to 'first pick' one of those instead of just getting more infrastructure. And since the scoring cards take resources and you need food every turn you have to balance immediate resource acquisition in there as well.