Once More Unto the Rulebook

I've covered the value of reading a game's rulebook. Today, let me add the value of reading a rulebook a second time.

We all know the best way to learn just about any board game is to have someone else teach you. Sometimes, though, you've bought something entirely new, and have to slog through the book yourself to figure it out. I have found that in these cases, once you've played about two or three times, it's generally a good idea to go back and read the rules again. By that point, you have enough of an understanding of the flow of the game that you'll probably find a point or two in the rules that somehow got into your head wrong when everything was completely alien to you.

Case in point, I finally re-read the rules to Der Untergang von Pompeji, aka the "Death by Volcano" game from the creator of Carcassonne. I was prodded to do so during a recent game where I managed to draw into a hand of nothing but 4 Omen cards. I'm thinking "this sucks! I can't possibly have this rule right!"

I didn't. Turns out, when you draw an Omen card, you immediately reveal it, and toss another player's piece into the volcano right then. You then draw another card for your hand. As those who have played with me before know, we'd been playing it that using an Omen card took up your entire turn -- a turn where you place no pieces, and kill an opponent's piece. In actuality, an Omen is a completely bonus action, an automatic killing.

What a difference this makes, let me tell you! You go from an average one or two Omens per game to an average of about eight. And because every one of those Omens drawn causes another card to be drawn immediately, you end up burning through the deck faster too. The net result is that there are far fewer pieces on the board -- more than a dozen less, total. Each player has around 2 to 5 fewer pieces.

This in turn makes the "running from the lava" phase play very differently too. With fewer pieces out there, there are far fewer opportunities for a piece to move several spaces -- generally speaking, you're only sharing a space with one other piece, if any at all. The handful of "three piece" spaces that do exist get moved away from in the very first rounds of fleeing.

In the end, the average score of a 4 player game has dropped from around 9 or 10 to around 5 to 7. A very, very different game. I can't decide which way I prefer it; it still feels like there might be just a little more randomness in that game that I typically prefer. Still, it's a fun one to pull out every now and again, and I have decided regardless that I'll be playing it correctly from now on.