Rival Troops

[Dragon]

Today, I played Rival Troops against Sean, my oldest daughter's boyfriend. Sean doesn't have a lot of experience with newer board games, but has played the traditional American games, such as Monopoly, Sorry, and Risk. He had also played Splendor before, which is a nice introduction to the world outside of the board games that most people are familiar with, but of course he had not played Rival Troops before.

Rival Troops is a 2-to-4 player tile-placement/modular-board game where players are adding land to a campground (the board) and have troop tokens that they can add to the campground and move around the board to secure the best locations. After I explained the rules, Sean started the game placing a 7-point-site from his hand right next to my starting campfire, then just mimicked what I was doing for the first few rounds after after that. Eventually he was catching on to more of the strategy of the game and was blocking a couple of the sites that I was trying to get, but in the end, I still won with nearly double his score.

[Dragon]

I played Rival Troops with my wife tonight. It was a close game. We had a good bit of give-and-take especially at the end when we were close on some spaces that were individually worth a lot of points. The final score was Beth: 41 vs. Nathaniel: 43.

[Dragon]

Today I introduced Rival Troops to a friend from church. After I explained the game, we got started with Joe starting first. (I figured as a Pathfinder leader, he has most likely made a fire more recently than I have, which is my suggested starting point for the game.) Joe caught onto the game pretty well and managed to get his troops spread out pretty well. I thought he did well for his first time playing. He got 42 points to my 64.

After the game he suggested that it could be a good game for combining two sets to make an 8-player game, of course you'd need to put marks on the second set in order to know keep them separate. Hmmm... I can imagine that a starting grid for that might be like an 8-pointed star. Since the troops can move in 4 directions without rotation, it would still allow players at North, South, East, or West starting points to get to the center in the same number of turns as the others at NW, NE, SE, and SW.

_	|_	|P1	|_	|_
_	|P8	|7	|P2	|_
P7	|7	|10	|7	|P3
_	|P6	|7	|P4	|_
_	|_	|P5	|_	|_

[Dragon]

I recently introduced Rival Troops to my friend Rick. He is a non-gamer, meaning that he will play board games with me, but I don't think he'd ever seek them out on his own. He did catch onto the game quickly though, as I had hoped, and had no problem disrupting some of my potential campsites. Final score: I had 67 points; Rick had 44.