It had been a good morning of gaming and it would continue
with my first playing of Ra. In Ra,
tiles are laid out one at a time on the board.
Players can choose to either to draw a tile from the bag to place on the
auction block or start a round of bidding.
Each player has four bidding tokens with a number on them. The bidding only goes around once, so they
have to decide how high they are willing to go in a round from the start as it
will never come back to them.
In the game, there are five or six different ways to score
as determined by the tiles you take, some of these are gathering the same
buildings, gathering different buildings, getting lands and a flood, along with
others.
As tiles are added to the board, there are some that are red
and automatically trigger bidding.
However, if nobody bids, you keep going as normal. Once everyone has used their bidding tokens
once, you count victory points for what you currently have and move on to the
second half of the game. Some cards,
such as floods and straight scoring pieces are only used in one part of the
game, so would be discarded here.
Everything else stays and you start the second half. Part of the fun is that when you win a bid,
you get all tiles currently on the board as well as the bidding chip from the
last person to win an auction. So, when
you start the second half, you use those chips.
Once everyone has used their bidding chips in the second
phase of the game or when the final red tile is drawn, the game is over and you
add your second phase victory points to the first for an overall winner.
I was able to pick up on this game pretty quickly out of the
blocks and did well gathering a ton of buildings.
Overall, I thought that I did a pretty good
job and finished third. Cory, however, dominated
in the end as shown below.
Cory – 57
Dan – 37
Me – 36
Leigh – 23
Eric – 23
Final Thoughts:
Much like the other early Egyptian themed game of the day,
Ra was a really fun game that would be a good transitional game from party to
strategy as the elements are quick to discover, while the strategy can be much
deeper than you would think at a glance.
The bidding process leads to allot of fun banter around the table, which
keeps the game fun and moving along.
A few of the tiles were a little tough to distinguish
between in the beginning and a few of the mechanics took a little trial and
error to figure out, but it only takes a couple of bidding phases to be right
in there.
A good group willing to talk and laugh is a big bonus here,
as are players who pay attention and keep the tile bag moving around with a
good pace. This is definitely a game
that can drag needlessly if one or more people are not engaged and let the bag
sit for no reason.
Luckily, we had a good group and did not have any issues,
which led to me thoroughly enjoying this game, maybe more than any other that I
played at the convention.
I look forward to playing this one again in the future.
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