A post about games! (Chariots)

["Iain Cheyne" <news@...>]

I had a good time playing Chariots last night. I wrote about it in my 
blog: http://cheyne.net/blog/index.cgi/board_games/chariots.html.

Here is what I wrote:

While sitting around recovering from jet-lag last night, I persuaded 
my brother and brother-in-law to play Chariots, a piecepack game. It 
was the simplest of the piecepack recommended games that I want to 
try on this trip, so it fitted our mood.

Chariots has some interesting mechanisms. It uses simultaneous action 
selection, borrows the impulse movement system of Car Wars and adds 
some clever cornering rules. Mark Biggar has compressed the game 
elegantly into the confines of the piecepack.

We played a three lap race, which was plenty. I won by about six 
squares, due to some lucky rolls and managing to stay out of the dog 
fight the others got involved in. We enjoyed the game. I gave it a 5, 
which is perfectly acceptable by my ratings. My brother-in-law gave 
it a 6 and my brother a 7.

I do have some quibbles with Chariots, but these are easily fixed.

I think it will only really play well with four players. It was just 
about OK with three, but it would be terrible with two. This is 
because the fun lies in trying to squeeze the other competitors out 
of the inside track and trying to force them to crash. It might be 
worth taking the central column of tiles out of the straight the next 
time we play with three, in order to compress the interest of 
jockeying around the corners.

The impulse movement system worked well, but could be a bit slow. For 
speed, it might be better if the rules explicitly stated that if 
someone is more than about two spaces from any other players that 
they can take a phase's movement in one go, without worrying
about 
separate impulses.

I only had one rules question. The rules don't specify who
decides 
which space a chariot goes into if they are pushed aside by an ace 
coin. We assumed it was the player who is doing the pushing, but it 
could be the pushed player. It might be more fun if this was somehow 
randomised with a dice roll.

It struck me while playing this how attractive my Mesomorph piecepack 
is. The wood feels and looks beautiful and the deep colours of the 
pawns are very striking. I have never played a piecepack game that 
used dice before and it was fun to shout "null point" everytime 
someone screwed up a cornering roll with a null - only Europeans will 
understand that reference.

This was a successful start to our holiday gaming. It's a good
omen.

-- 
Iain