A long time ago I played a game called History of the World.  It was long.  It was good.  Years later we still played History of the World, but Hasbro had put out a pretty newer edition with lots of plastic pieces.  Oooh – cool!  But Hasbro stopped making the pretty piece edition, and its value went way high.  I got greedy and sold my plastic piece edition for lots of money, and bought more games with my proceeds.  But I missed it, so I found an old copy of the first Avalon Hill edition with nice cardboard counters.  But I never played it.  The old timers didn’t want to play History of the World anymore, and the newer friends either wanted to play on the plastic piece edition, or just play something more modern.

Then the authors, with the provocative name of “the Ragnar Brothers” released “Fire and Axe“.  Fun game.  Complete with cool plastic pieces, Vikings running amok, and I was thrilled with this new game from the authors of History of the World.  So then I got curious, what else had they done?

Backpacks and Blisters – Kings and Castles - 1500 Gold.   I tried them, and while each had something interesting to offer, I began to realize the Ragnar’s were not golden.  Some of their games really appealed to me, while others let me cold.  One interesting feature of some of their older games was the tea towel.  Instead of a game board, several of their games feature a printed tea towel.  The Ragnars suggest tossing it in the wash if you spill your beer on the game!  And the towel does seem like a bit of inspiration.  Unfortunately I found the folded edges to never lay flat, so the plastic overlay was generally used.

Then we come to the modern era of Ragnar game releases.  Canal Mania was, I believe, their first effort of producing a modern Euro game that would match up to expected production standards.  They got an attractive box designed, a reasonably good map, and they lost the tea towel for a nice mounted board.  Tiles and cards were generally acceptable.  The game left me a bit cool, but it was reasonably well accepted by the hobby.  It seemed that the Ragnars had arrived!

Next up – Monastery.  A bit of a foul ball.  It’s sort of advanced Carcassonne.  But almost everyone seems deeply sick of Carcassonne.  The playing pieces tended to topple a bit too much, and the theme just wasn’t that enticing for many.

Next – ooh!  A revision to their master piece, now named “A Brief History of the World“.  The game was produced in China, and the cards especially seemed a bit substandard.  But the board was lovely and the box design was fine.  Oddly the rules seemed to be a bit under written, surprising for a game that has had three prior editions.

Now up – Workshop of the World - What happened here?  Several decisions were made in the production of this game that seem like rookie mistakes.  In this game you make in-the-fist bids with coins.  Surely including coins bigger than some players hands must have seemed like a poor decision to someone?  The graphic design of the board is VERY BLOCKY.  Lots of solid primary colors.  Player colors and non-player board colors have no reason to be the same, but they are.  The playing pieces must be placed on top of important game information marked on the board.  So players must constantly shift pieces to see game info.  Shifting the pieces is also dodgy, as the game employs tall cylinders, which are easy to knock over, and then they roll.

Workshop of the World does seem like a decent game.  But the production qualities are horrendous, and actually interfere with the gameplay.  If the Ragnars were releasing their first game, I would just chalk it up to inexperience.  But these guys have been releasing games on their own label for 20 years.  I don’t understand how they allowed these sorts of stupid errors to creep into a game.

I remain a Ragnar fan, but Workshop of the World is not their best effort.

Today I decided to prep for a big game of Memoir ’44.  I have nearly every expansion for this game, and a quick order to the online game store means I’ll soon be caught up completely.  A few months ago I bought a collection from a fellow who was getting out of Memoir.  This made it easy to “catch up”.  With my recent purchase, I now will have pretty much two of everything released, apart from the special big maps – where a single copy seems plenty.

I have divided the game into two campaign bags, one Axis and the other Allied.  I do wish my Axis bag was gray instead of pea green – but I have not yet gone to the effort of dying it.  (It would still have American marking on it…)

On one level it is sort of insane to have this much Memoir game material – I only play it once a year.  But it is now a tradition, and I do rather enjoy sifting through the materials.  I may even consider how I could play it in a linked series sometime.  So gentle reader, do you have any interest in playing a series of Memoir games?

I seem to enjoy always having something “new” slated to come to me.  Here is a view of the more recent stuff:

Freight Train – An older Alan Moon design.  I played it once a while back, and it didn’t really work as a 2p game.  I perhaps foolishly let it go.  When a first edition White Wind copy was offered to me, I decided to try it again.

Wind River – I probably shouldn’t have gotten this one.  But it looks worth a try.  Seems a bit straightforward, so I’ll be curious to see if it offers something more than I am gleaning from the rules.  I have enjoyed Hansa Teutonica so much, I was interested in trying the preceeding game from that publisher.

Panzergruppe Guderian – I finally snagged a copy of the Avalon Hill edition.  Unfortunately, I am unsure when I might have an opponent for this.  Fortunately it is regarded as a very good solitaire game.

On the playing front…

Hansa Teutonica continues to please.  It is shaping up to be my most played game this year.

Moongha Invaders has amused me.  Two plays so far and I want to play at least a couple more times.  Each time we have played I have discovered we made a mistake.  I want to get in a game where we use all the rules correctly.  While at a different scale, this game fills a hole that was left when I disposed of my old “The Creature that Ate New York” game.

Confucius – Just one play.  I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t a solid hit.  The gift-giving and obligations thereby associated was great.  The kingmaking, low scores and lack of end-game bonus points was not as great.

1829 Mainline – I got in a 4p game of this recently.  I tweaked the rules a bit.  When we played before, I was disturbed by how few stock rounds we got in an evenings worth of gaming.  So I re-inserted a progression where we did just 1 operating round so long as no “3″ train had been purchased.  We moved to 2 operating rounds when the first “3″ train was purchased, and we moved to 3 ORs when a “4E” train was purchased.

This did allow us to get in more Stock Rounds.  But it had some consequences.  It elevated the importance of the private companies (probably a good thing), it reduced the need to fully invest in the opening stock round (just different), and it generally made the 2nd and 3rd stock rounds anemic, as we had not yet built much of a revenue stream (slightly bad).

1829 Mainline is turning out to NOT be the faster playing 18xx game I thought it was intended to be.  Each time I have played it multi-player, we have agreed to play a time-limit game.  This works, but is also somewhat frustrating.  We never get to the big engines, and so we feel like we didn’t really play the game.

I have also played Mainline as a solitaire game frequently.  In the solitaire game there is an unexpected wrinkle.  You build a “Patience” style card formation, where you move cards around to like columns and then can buy a single column of shares.  This is innovative and fun, giving a variable situation to navigate each time you play.  But once again, I never seem to get to the large trains before breaking the reduced bank.

So recently I tried an experiment.  I set up a mock 3p game and gave myself the full bank 20,000 pounds sterling.  Whew!  That is a BIG bank.  It took 2 evenings of solitaire gaming, but I saw many of the late game engines come out, and I saw how a corporation could leap forward after securing a solid route and train base.  Unfortunately this aspect of the game takes considerable time to reveal itself.