Ok I have been looking at various area enclosure games and I know that GO is great game, but what other area enclosure games are "good"?
Are most area enclosure games like go where your main player goal is control the most area?
What are some other good aspects of area enclosure?
What are some issues with area enclosure?
I'm not aware of a lot of games in this genre, but I highly recommend the game Lowenherz by Klaus Teuber of Settlers fame. Another game I played and thought was pretty good was Alexandros by Leo Colvini.
Based on this very small sample of two games, I would say that the source of tension in such games would be the conflict between expanding your realm (and thus scoring more points) vs strengthening your position in the areas that you already control.
I think that area-enclosure can give a different feel from area-majoirty in the same way that auction games give a different feel from fixed-price games. The players themselves set the parameters for VPs; the bigger region you can carve out, the more VPs you get, so you have to strike your own balance between size and stability. This is in contrast to a fixed-value game like El Grande. (Interestingly, my favorite game Web of Power, now revamped as China, has a middle road between this where placement opportunities are limited but points scale based on who has placed in a territory).
The main "issue" I could foresee with games like this is component fiddliness associated with marking your territory. The system used in Lowenherz to expand your territory feels clunky to me for some reason.
I think there are relatively few games in this genre, so I think it's wide open. In particular, I think it might be interesting to see a "free-form" area enclosure game, where regions aren't constrained to a grid like Lowenherz or Alexandros. Maybe a "cattle ranching" game or something like that. Hmm...gets me thinking!
-Jeff
... what other area enclosure games are "good"?
jwarrend wrote:I highly recommend the game Lowenherz
There was a geeklist a while back about area control games:
http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist.php3?action=view&listid=7187
Cathedral seems to fit well here, and from what I've been reading, the new Fjorde ( http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/15511 ) is being called a light combination of Carcassonne and Go.
And for a somewhat less than serious approach to the whole idea, you could look at "Who Let The Dogs Out?", my entry in the first Showdown contest(link here)
I must confess that I rather like the unorthodox "area control" mechanic that was forced upon me by virtue of the preset components list - because the pieces were already mutli-coloured (rather than uniform); hence the area majority was determined by fence-representation as well as by having tokens within the area.
IOW I think there's still a lot of scope for novel innovations in the genre.
...I would say that the source of tension in such games would be the conflict between expanding your realm (and thus scoring more points) vs strengthening your position in the areas that you already control.
There's also Goldbrau for area enclosure of beer gardens. The interesting and tense mechanics for me aren't necessarily how the areas grow but in how the areas potentially change ownership, specifically the threat rather than the execution (e.g. via Goldbrau's hidden tavern/brewery share cards held by players).
Dave W.
I'm surprised "Through the Desert" hasn't been mentioned yet. It has an area enclosure mechanic similar to Go, and it is one of several ways to score points.
Hmmm. My instinctive interpretation of this leads me to consider that "Carcassonne" is an area-enclosure game :-)
Ah, that's "affirming the consequent". "All games that are in category X have aspect Y" does not equate to "all games with aspect Y belong to category X".
-Jeff, who has been accused of enough logical fallacies in his internet career to know some of them...
-Jeff, who has been accused of enough logical fallacies in his internet career to know some of them...
Assertion1: Nothing is better than Eternal Happiness.
Assertion2: A Ham Sandwich is better than nothing.
Conclusion: Therefore a Ham Sandwich is better than Eternal Happiness.
1. I exist.
2. You exist.
3. Exactly one of these three sentences is false.
Statement: If I try then I will succeed.
p > q
Biconditional: I will succeed if and only if I try.
p > q or (q>p) ^ (p>) q)
Converse: If I succeed I try.
q > p
Inverse: If I do not try then I do not succeed.
~p > ~ q
Contrapositive: If I do not succeed then I do not try.
~p > ~p.
Ah well, I tried!!!
This sentence is false!
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AAaaaaargh...........the pain. :)