 The game we're about to talk about, Vinci, is a 3-to-6 player game. Yep, we actually talked about this game once before in an episode of Geek Nights, but it was an episode where he talked about a whole lot of crap, so we're gonna concentrate now on the whole game of Vinci and go into the details that we probably missed in that other episode. Of course, I didn't re-listen to that other episode, so I have no idea how much we talked about Vinci, but I don't care either. That's fine, because Vinci is still one of my favorite games. Vinci is a damn good game. It's in my top 10 or 15, but easily. Yeah, I'd say top 15 definitely, 10 maybe. Well, partly because a lot of my games that would be in there, I've decided or discovered that they are flawed, or I've otherwise solved them. And once a game is solved, it's really not fun anymore. Like, Settlers is a great game, but I can't put it in my top 10 because it's not a great game anymore. So Vinci is a civilization game. You've got Europe and the surrounding bits, mostly Europe. And over time, civilizations rise and fall, and they rise and they fall. And some are big, and some are small, and some last a long time, and some last not so long. And some are really good at mountaining, and some are really good at fighting, and some are really good at farming, and whatever. And over the course of this game, each player builds civilizations and then lets them go in order to build newer civilizations. Now, I think this is a really cool mechanic where you build a civilization and it has powers, whatever, and you move around the board in a deterministic, taking things from other players or from barbarians way. And then, whenever you think your empire has either been totally butt-fucked by someone, which happens fairly often. Pretty often, and if everyone's good at playing. Or it's peaked, or whatever reason, you choose not to just get rid of it and start a new one, but to decline it. It falls into decline, much like the Roman or Byzantine empires. Right, so let's say I don't have any special things, right? I build an empire that is 10 countries large, 10 areas on the map large. I'm getting 10 points a turn from that without anything special, right? So I decide, you know what? There's not really any way that I can expand this empire, you know, because nothing increases in military might over time. Except medicine. Except medicine. Unless you have medicine, your pretty much, your strength of your civilization does not increase. It can only, you just use the power that it has to expand over the course of a few turns, and then you just can't expand anymore. You can move around, but you can't get any bigger, unless you have medicine. So, the save has reached this max. I got 10 spaces, it can't get bigger. I say, all right, I'm declining. I put little crumbling pillars in all those 10 spaces, and that place still gets me 10 points, because it's still 10 spaces that belong to me. Yep, but now you can't do anything with that empire. I can't do anything with it. It's just a bunch of stuff on the board that gets me points, it doesn't do anything. Much like the later Byzantine Empire, it exists solely to be slowly picked apart by all the other players. Yep, everyone else will pick it apart, but you hope they pick it apart less quickly, because you're still getting points from it, just not that many. Meanwhile, after I decline that empire, I make a new civilization that hopefully will get me many, many points. Hopefully, it will get me many, many points while the old one still exists so that I can get a whole lot of points from both at once. So the game goes around, where each player will get an empire, build it, interact with all the other players, and then everyone chooses in a cycle when to decline and start new empires. And sometimes a bunch of people all decline at once. Sometimes one guy just gets screwed and has to decline early. Sometimes one guy just does really well and declines of his own volition. Actually, it's really funny. Several times, we basically, you really get into this game with a theme, because you see, oh, those are obviously the fins, or ah, that's the Romans, just the way the board sets up for the powers they have or whatever. Yeah, I mean, if some guy starts his civilization coming in on England, and then he takes over France, it's like, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. As opposed to, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Yes. But many times we end up having a dark age where suddenly it'll go around and everyone will decline and the entire board just falls into darkness and decay. It's fun, quite fun. Yeah. Granted, we really get into our board games, but I think that anyone who enjoys board games really and truly enjoys them gets into games like that. You have to have your little sticks, your little playing around. Well, that's what German board gaming is about. A guy wrote an article recently saying, Y'all got a brick? Yeah, he's like, what's the difference between abstract games and Euro games? He's like, pretty pictures painted on the board. And the thing is, while I'm usually the kind of person who says it's all about the gameplay, the theme is whatever, when you play a German board game, it's not so much the theme itself that makes the game better. It's the fact that the way the players interact with the theme to add another layer of entertainment above the game play itself. And every gaming group seems to have its own little bits and its own little inside things or ways they get into games. Yeah, it can range from just calling the pieces of the game. Pieces from other games. Like a different name than what it's supposed to be called. Like imagine if you're playing, I don't know, let's think of an American game. Well, it's like you're playing Monopoly and you don't call it boardwalk. You call it, I don't know, something else. Yeah. Or you don't call it free parking. You call it the car crash. We tend to go around in a cycle. Like in Puerto Rico, there's a governor and in Amon Ray, there's the pharaoh. But we tend to call the governor the pharaoh and the pharaoh the governor. Yeah, we just are like in El Grande. There's a guy who's the king, but you just call him the penis because it looks like a giant penis. Well, it looks like a very small penis. Yes, but it's like, you know, and we're not allowed to touch the king in El Grande. So we say, don't touch the penis. You're not allowed to touch a penis under any circumstance. The thing is, people don't get that rule. No matter how many times, whenever we're playing with someone always tries to do something with the penis. I don't know what it is. And it's always like, it was the only rule you had to remember. It was the first one. So in Vinci, there's quite a bit of that because when you get a new civilization, basically there's a bag. And the bag has little chits in it. And on each chit is a civilization trait such as livestock breeding, or weapons, field general, or fortification. Agriculture. Something like that. And you draw these out of the bag in sets of two. And each set of two is a civilization. And when you get a new civilization, you pick one of the available sets of two. If it's been sitting out there for a while, you can just take it without any worries. If it's a new one, you kind of have to pay victory points to get it. This gives you sort of a, early in the game, it adds a little randomness. But later in the game, it evens out because now civilizations that nobody wanted are now very enticing because you might even get points just for taking them. It's very much a well-constructed built-in balance system because the powers that civilizations can get are definitely not all equal. And civilization combinations can be stupidly powerful or stupidly useless. But the game will always increase the incentive continuously to take a bad civilization. And in the end, it's not that bad because, all right. So I've got... You'll have a choice between taking a badass civilization but having to pay 10 victory points to get it before someone else does or taking a shitty civilization that's been sitting there since the beginning of the game. But if you take it, you get 10 points. That's a tough call right there. It also adds a lot of strategy where you might want to decline, but you don't want any of the civilizations out. Or what I do often is there's a civilization you want, but it's too far out on the track and too expensive. You all gotta wait for other people to decline before you can get it. But you gotta hope that no one just pays the price. But then again, if they do pay the price, then you get some victory points that you don't care anymore. Yep. It's really a tough balancing act. But anyway, each civilization has these traits and these traits, you know, put slight modifiers on how that particular civilization is going to work. It determines how the military might of the civilization, how far it can expand, how quickly it can expand, and in what ways it can expand. For example, astronomy, if your civilization has astronomy, you can just expand all over the place because you can take the water for free because you can navigate. Whereas people without astronomy can't really go over the water that much at all. And they have to basically keep conquering adjacent land civilization, countries, not civilization. Yeah. So these traits add a lot of fun to the game because you get, let's say you get barbarians and mountaineering and you start in... I much prefer barbarians, barbarians. Yes. And you start in Norway. You go, ha, ha, ha, we are defiking. Ha, ha, ha, we get you, we crush you from the north. And it is quite fun. I think the best description of all the powers is the barbarian one because it gives you a lot of guys. And the description is, barbarians have no special powers. There are just a lot of them. Yep. I love them barbarians. Now the way combat works, because the board is a lot like risk. In fact, it's almost exactly like risk. Without dice, though. Yeah, on the board, not the... I'm saying the board. Very specifically, I said the board. All right. Wait a minute, listen. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Anyway, so the board is a lot like risk and you have your little tokens that you put on the territories to how many guys you have there. But when you want to conquer a place, it is straight up deterministic. It costs you X guys. And by cost, I mean you have to put X guys down on that place in order to take it. And you can expand to your heart's content until you run out of guys for that round. Then you pick all your guys up and reconcile it in however you want. So, no, because it's really simple. Basically it costs, in order to take a place, you have to have two guys there, minimum, plus one for every guy the opponent has there, plus any modifiers like if it's a mountain or a forest which are harder to take or it has a fortress there, minus any other modifiers like if you have weapons or you're attacking from the mountain and all sorts of things like that. And if you put the number of guys down, that's it and you took it. And the other person has to take their guys up. Yeah. If they had one guy there, that guy dies. If they had two guys there, one guy dies. And the other guy they get to put in one of their other places. Yeah. If there are three guys there, one guy dies. Pretty much always one guy dies. Anytime you take an opponent's place, one of the guys that they have left there is lost from their army or their civilization forever until they decline and pick a new one. Now thing, you'll start with maybe, I don't know, 12, 14 guys total. Unless you have medicine, you'll never have more than that. Every time you lose a territory, your civilization has been irrevocably weakened. Yep. And it's never going to get stronger. Medicine is the only exception. If your civilization has medicine, it increases by one guy every turn. Just one. That might seem pretty good. You have a civilization that grows in a game where civilizations can only shrink and it can help, but if your civilization doesn't last very long, it's not going to help that much. The problem I see most people having with medicine is that they tend to use it and despite having medicine, which is good, and you want to hold on to that civilization for a long time, they hold on to a civilization longer than they should have just because they feel like they should because they have medicine. Yep. A big part of this game is knowing when to just cut and run. Just figuring out, all right, this civilization's not doing anything for me. I got to dump it now. Because the key way to win the game is you want to get as many... Well, the key way to win the game is to be Alex. That's true, but the way the game works is it's not whoever has the most points after so many turns wins. It's the first person to get x points wins. And let's say the guy who goes first, the first player, crosses the line, then everyone else still gets to take their turn to see if they can jump ahead. That way everyone gets an equal number of turns. But it's a race. So you want to get points is not just a lot of them, but quickly. So a plan that gets a few points early on and then a bunch later is not so good. You want to get points constantly, all the time, nonstop. And the way to do that is you want to get one civilization on the board because you start the game blank, and then you decline it and you get another civilization on the board. And that lets you get points from the declining civilization and your current civilization simultaneously. Then when the old civilization is starting to get smaller, you decline the one you've got and you're bringing a new one, and you try to balance it so you're always getting points from a declining and a current civilization at all times. If you can keep that up, usually it's unrealistic to keep that up at full steam the whole game. But get as close to that as you can. And that's the way to get as many points as possible and cross the line before the other players do. Now, one really fun thing about this game, because it's really rare in most German or Euro-style board games, is that unlike most other games, there is direct, straight-up, man-to-man fucking of players by other players. And not the sexual kind. You will have options that... I mean, some games you could hurt another player, but it always hurts you too or isn't optimal. In this game, not only is it okay to just straight-up attack other players all the time or to purposefully knock someone out of the game for a round, but it is often the best way to win. Yeah. In fact, when we first started playing this game, because we were used to playing Puerto Rico... Sometimes the game even just forces you to hurt other people. Yeah. You have no choice. But all these other games we were playing, we really were very congenial to each other. And we very much... Like, people wouldn't step on each other's toes. We'd all be like, I'll build over here and you build over here. And there wasn't a lot of fighting, because you always felt like in any other game, whenever you directly attack another player, usually you just weaken yourself and them, and then some other player wins. Yeah. It's generally other games seem to have a lot stronger prisoners dilemma mechanic, where if everyone just cooperates and no one fucks anyone, we can all get a lot of points. And this will become a game of who gets the most points. And if anyone decides to just, you know, screw everyone, it's gonna really just not turn out well for them. And the one guy who stays out of it, it's like, let's say me rim and Alex are playing a game, right? And I attack rim. Well, that hurts rim and it hurts me and Alex wins. In Vinci, that is not the case. The prisoner's dilemma is not an accurate model at all. Yep. In fact, in Vinci, pretty much, you have to always screw other players, particularly whoever's doing better than you, as hard as you can, as much as you can, while simultaneously getting points for yourself. It is a game that I will say right now, if you cannot distance yourself from a game emotionally, or if you're the kind of person who takes it personally, if another player like straight up just says, I am going to ruin you and then ruins you in a game, you can't play Vinci. You will not like it. You will not like it. I mean, there was one game I remember where I declined to civilization and I came off the board. I selected a new civilization that had quite as large military power. Alex came onto the board and the game, the board goes around and then it was my turn again. There was really no option for me to come onto the board in a way that would get me a lot of points because you can't go near your declining civilization. I'm not going to get into the rules of it, but needless to say, the best option for me was to come into the board and the exact same spot Alex had just come into the board. And I came into the board so strongly, I completely eliminated his entire brand new civilization that existed for only one time. I remember when it happened and we're all sitting there looking at it, he just says, well, shit. Yeah, he was just, I declined. I took all of his guys off the board. He could either try to come on the board again with his remaining pieces, which like five of them were dead, or decline. I basically made him lose an entire turn, which is huge, absolutely huge. And for me, it didn't bother me at all because I put my guys on the board. I was going to put them on the board somewhere. I got them all on the board. See, got as many points as they could have gotten. Now, that's another really fun thing about this game. The board is set up to where different areas of the board are laid out kind of differently and have different strengths and weaknesses. And depending on the civilizations that come out, some areas become more or less desirable or more or less defensible or more or less point worthy, depending on what's out there. So say there's three civilizations that all need agriculture. Now all the places where there's agriculture nearby become hotly contested and dangerous to be in. Yeah, but you can also look at the available civilizations and say, wow, there's three agriculture civilizations. I'm not playing that game. I'm going to take the, even though it might not be as good a civilization, I'm going to take the livestock civilization so I don't have to deal with that shit. And it might actually get you more points, even though judging from a general standpoint, it's not as good a civilization. It doesn't have as much military might. It doesn't have as much point bonus potential. But for the situation that the game is currently in, it might actually be superior in terms of how well you can defend with it, how long it will last, and how many points it will net you in total. Now, like I said before, one of the really strong points of this game is also that it has three to six players, which is great because most games are four player, or there's the few five player ones, but having that six player. And games that are like, most games will be three, four or five players. And some of them like only work well with like four and like the three and the five are kind of hackany. Yeah, like Tigers and Euphrates is three to four, or two to four, depending on what version you have, even though they're the same. It doesn't work at all, two player, and it works really craftily three player, but four player is one of the best games ever. It's kind of weird because the German version of Tigers and Euphrates is two to four, and the English version says three to four, but really it's a four player only game, if you ask me. But then Vinci, much like Puerto Rico, every number of players is the same basic game, but in terms of strategy and the way the game plays out, it's like an entirely different game. So you basically bought a three, four, five, and six player game, each one of which is different. Slightly different. I mean, the four and the five aren't so different. But the different, like the three player game is a separate game with completely separate strategies. Civilization, like a civilization that is stupidly awesome in the three player game is kind of useless in the six player game. While a civilization that would win in the six player game is not so great in the three player game. I think what it is is when you're playing like the six, the larger player games, the main difference in the rules is that every civilization is going to be weaker militarily. And the reason that is is because obviously that way all the civilizations can fit on the same board at once. If everyone had a super strong civilization, then you would just conquer the whole board and someone else would conquer the whole board. And in a three player game where you really only had to divide the board into three, you know, parts, you can have a pretty strong civilization that's large enough to conquer a third of the board. In a six player game, you really can only have a civilization strong enough to conquer a sixth of the board or else the game gets screwed up big time. So in a six player game, you tend to make civilizations that are smaller, yet have to get more points with less might and deal with being adjacent to more players and being on the board for a shorter period of time. Now, there is some randomness in play just in terms of the fact that a lot can happen between your turns as other players act. But it's not randomness that's just in the game. It's randomness of what other players will do, which are things that you can fairly readily anticipate. Yeah, the only real randomness is what civilizations there are at the beginning of the game. Because it's possible that at the beginning of the game the best civilization ever is the first one. Whoever gets to go first picks it and hooray for them. They just got lucky. However, the game lasts long enough and is constructed in such a way that one good civilization will, in most cases, not win you the game. Yeah. So I think I've been paying attention and people who go first and pick that awesome civilization right away that tends not to be so helpful. They don't tend to win all the time or anything. Well, it used to be that Alex won this game a disproportionate amount of the time. But now just recently, the last several playings, pretty much every game ends extremely close and one of us just pulls ahead by the end. Yeah, I won. I won. Yeah, I won too. All right. Everyone's winning this game. Everyone's winning. I think we have solved the three-player game, at least in so far as nobody makes any boneheaded moves. And everyone plays pretty optimally and it comes down to very minor tactical decisions in terms of who wins. Like literally, if I lose a game or Scott loses a game, it'll be like in the middle of the game I waited one round too long to decline that one civilization. Yep. And that's that was a gin. But the fact is it wasn't random. It's, oh, I made X mistake. Damn it. Yep. Yep. I don't know what happened. I do sometimes feel, not often, but occasionally, you know, one game every once in a while, like there aren't any good civilizations coming up. Like every civilization that comes up is crap. Luckily, everyone has to deal with that. Yeah, but the problem is, if there was say good civilization early on and someone got it and then everyone else gets crap, someone gets a slight lead. And if all the civilizations continue to be crap, they don't have a hard time maintaining that lead, and then they win. Yep. But again, because the game is long enough, it really seems to mitigate that. Yeah, it doesn't happen often, but it can happen. And if you find randomness being a factor just by your style of play, there's nothing wrong with just adding another 50 victory points to the victory condition and then playing a longer game. Yep. The longer the game goes, the more the luck will even out. Yeah. And also, if you really wanted to, you could develop some sort of civilization drafting mechanism. Of course, the game does have a civilization drafting mechanism. A very good one, I might add. But you could add to it to remove the drawing them out of the bag and somehow doing something else. I don't even know if you want to bother with that. I don't think it's necessary, but it is a possibility if you're really crazy. Now also, we talk a lot about German style games, but this is actually a French game. Oh! It was designed by Philippe... It is a game for frogs. Philippe or Philippe? K-Arts. K-E-Y-A-E-R-T-S? Yes. It was put out by Descartes Editeur. Editeur. Editeur. Oh, it is a French game. Oh, this is the best. It didn't win any Spiel des Yars or anything, obviously, because it's not a German game or anything, but it won the 1999 Concoise Internationale de Créateurs des Jeux de Société. What is that? The International Creators of Game Society Conference. Or something to that effect. That's not bad. Now the guy who designed this game, he looks like he also made, as far as I can see, a game called EVO, which we've also played, which was kind of meh, but then again, we played it with some kind of meh people. So, that was a long time ago. Oh, I played that game. That game was meh. Oh, no, wait. We played it with meh people and we played it with cool people. I played it twice. Oh, wait. I don't think... Did I play this game? I don't remember. We played it at those other board gaming nights we used to go to. Not our wag, but the other one. Oh, I did play this game. Yes, I did. Yeah. And I think we also played it with Luke on a separate occasion. Yeah, this game was meh. Yeah, it was okay. It wasn't a great idea. I'd like to play the game again. Again, now that I'm a little older and wiser in the ways of German games, because back then, I still thought El Grande was the hot shit. Yeah. I still like El Grande, but it's not the hot shit. No, it's not. Okay, now here's something else you got to know about Vinci that has nothing to do with the game itself. There are two printings of Vinci. There's an old busted printing with a lot of typos and all sorts of problems. The one we have. Yep. Well, Alex got it super cheap on the discount rack. All right, Alex owns that game, not us. Yep. And... I always forget because it's in our house. And there is the new hotness printing that doesn't have these problems. And if you buy this game, I suggest you buy the new hotness printing unless you can get the old busted printing for the cheapness. See, if you can get the old printing for cheap, you can go and figure out what the corrections are on Board Game Geek and you'll save a lot of money. They're actually pretty minor. Yeah. Generally, you just want to avoid paying full price for the old busted version. And it is worth it to pay full price for the new hotness version. That's all I'm going to say. All right. One last thing about Vinci. If you want to play this game without buying it at the store in a box or if you can't find it or something, you can play it online at a website called Lutagora. W-W-W.L-U-D-A-G-O-R-A.net. It's a French website. So it's kind of hard to read. French is not that hard to read. Well, it's kind of... It's a little bit hard to figure out what to click on to be able to play the game. But once you play in the game, at least. Yeah. The interface is kind of bad. But you can play the game there and it works. Hey, it's not nearly as bad as that online Tiger's New Freddy's that didn't even work. No, no, no. Spiel by Web is still the best online board game turn-based playing site. But Lutagora exists and they have Vinci. So if you want to play Vinci, you can head over there and have some Vinci fun. I highly recommend Vinci because it is in the very least, unlike many games we own, it has stood up to the test of repeated continuous play. There aren't many games that we could play three times in the same day and not be sick of it. And this game is one of those few. Yeah, and a lot of games get played out. We're like, up, I know the answer to this game. There's no point in playing it anymore. It's just an exercise in exercising our fingers, moving pieces around. But Vinci, it's still an okay game and I'm not always in the mood to play it. But I'm never gonna say, probably never gonna say that there's nothing else to be had with Vinci. No reason to play that anymore is it's not a solved game by any means.