20th Feb 2025 - Amerigo
by Robin. Sat 22 Feb (Updated at Sat 22 Feb)Regular visitors will be familiar with the excellent set of gaming tables that we have at the club. Up to 6' by 4', with the branded games mats to go with them, there's no game they can't handle. Or is there?
At this club, of course, we like to take gaming to its limits. So, eventually, we have found a flaw with the tables, with the extreme gaming experience of Amerigo.
Amerigo, you say? But that's just an old Feld game - it's about as un-extreme as they come! In some ways, yes. But that would be to overlook the unique entertainment of the Cube Tower.
There are 49 cubes, and each turn you drop a few of them into the top of the tower, and a few come out the bottom, and these determine which actions you can take. Some are the ones you dropped in, some aren't. So you can plan your strategy as far ahead as you like, but there's always this element of randomness to keep you guessing.
A game centred around a novel gameplay mechanic. So far, so Feld. But the thing that really intrigues me about this one - besides the nice blend of strategic and tactical thinking that it brings - is strange blend of science and comedy that the physical structure produces.
I do software as my day job, but there's enough of the mechanical engineer in me to be fascinated by the inner workings of this tower. It's powered entirely by gravity but always manages - reliably - to retain about 5 cubes inside it, while allowing somewhere between 4 and 9 cubes to fall out each go. These ratios are crucial to the balance of the game. Did Feld design this thing? From Archimedes to Brunel, none of the more established engineers ever built such a device.
Anyway, that's the science element. As for the comedy... you're deep in your turn, the game is reaching its climax, there's some deep thinking to be done. Then, decision made; you choose your action and move something on the board, and place it down, still unsure if you've done the right thing... and then, jarred by the placing-down motion, another cube wriggles loose and falls out of the tower. Everyone laughs and you're brought out of your analysis paralysis and back down to earth with a chuckle. Nothing like a bit of slapstick to keep things in perspective.
And so we found the flaw with the tables. You need a perfectly stable surface for the Cube Tower, otherwise a butterfly flapping its wings outside will be enough to release a cube mid-turn, which you feel will somehow change the outcome of the whole game. But this is one (presumably) unintended outcome that I wouldn't want to fix. Forget the theme (as with most Feld games 🙂); in fact forget the whole game - just give me the Cube Tower and I'll be happy.
If you are interested in the theme (as I normally am), it's another one about Europe colonising the rest of the world. In this case it's the very early days of the New World with Amerigo Vespucci, so hopefully not quite as morally dubious as the plantation-era ones. You get points for gathering resources, fighting off pirates, bringing home gold, and discovering islands. And the islands and resources are randomly configured on a modular map - another mechanic that I really like.
As you'd expect from a Feld game, you can win by focussing on any combination of the scoring methods. I felt like Andy probably should have won, having gained points from each of the different ways, whereas I focussed almost exclusively on the islands. But in the final round, the Cube Tower threw a few cube combos that were very favourable to me, so I was able to pip him. Or maybe setting yourself up for whatever cubes fall out is part of the game. Whatever. Anyway, every game with cubes should have a Cube Tower option in my opinion. Brass, Age Of Steam, Pulsar 2849 - would be some interesting variants in there.
Elsewhere it seemed to be a week of fairly light games. I saw The White Castle and Power Grid, and then two tables were playing an evening of lighter games in general - I saw Scout and El Dorado, not sure what else. And finally Stroganov, which I'd never heard of and know nothing about, other than that it generated some good (and some bad) casserole-themed puns on the club WhatsApp chat beforehand.