Beer & Pretzels 2013

[Zarniwoop]

Well another year has past and so, unfortunately, has another Beer & Pretzels event.

As ever there was a good turn out with new as well familiar faces turning up for this weekend of gaming nirvana.
Managed to catchup with Jackson Pope, whom I have not seen in a while but have been following on twitter, BGG and his blog as he works on his new project. It was great to see him again and get a chance to play some games, I just hope we can catch up at other events or at next years B&P.

	Started the weekend off well with a quick game of Race to Adventure a quick filler game running at approx 30mins or so that handles 2-5 players. The artwork and components are of excellent quality and it is a really enjoyable game, which when played with a good number, can be quite tense as people compete for various actions to complete the missions on at the various world locations in order to collect stamps. The stamps , once you have collected them all, allow you to win the game should you be the first back to the Century club. The game is quite simple but there are tactics and plans to be made in order to make best use of your turn. The cards that form the world locations are dealt randomly to form a 3x3 grid, this makes for a different challenge each game with the addition that there is a Shadow side of each location as well as the century club. This should provide numerous combinations to keep the game fresh and interesting. Great design as I always enjoy playing this, it certainly provided a nice simple start to the day. Playing this was myself, Jackson, Nick, Neil and Terry with Neil managing to grab the win!
	Next up on the playlist was Police Precinct another Kickstarter game, there are those that like and Dislike the Kickstarter model but there are some gems coming out through that method and I think this is one of them. Really nice game design, the board and the components are well done fitting the theme quite well. Mostly a co-operative game, though there is a variant to play with a traitor (Dirty Cop). The idea is there has been a murder and you as a group are trying to investigate this crime to gather enough evidence to be able to arrest the culprit before he can escape the city. Trouble is you have emergencies, street gangs, car accidents, escort duties etc. etc. All the things that the Police need to do to keep the city streets safe, so you have to juggle getting evidence with solving these various distractions. All the time the number of turns are counting down, the murderer is making good his escape and the crime levels are rising. There are multiple ways to lose this game, with only one sure way to win It plays really well and the event cards, special abilities, evidence cards all add up to building a suitable atmosphere as you play the game. It feels like you are walking a tight-rope as you all try and balance the achieving your goal and keeping control of the city, I really enjoyed playing this and would gladly play it again. Whilst it was definitely touch and go there for quite a while, we finally got all the evidence we needed and managed to arrest the murderer. Playing this game was: Myself, Barry, Nick, Terry and jackson
	next up was Snowdonia where players represent workers trying to complete the mountain railway. It is a worker placement style game with some interesting choices and tasks to complete in order to score points. The game is played until the track is completed and the unique point is that the game will start to play itself and move things along of the players fail to do it quickly enough. I really thought I had a plan on this one, I got a couple of good scoring contracts requiring track to be built and another for the Surveyor to get extra points if he was at certain stations along the track. Sadly for me, with several players hoarding resources for a big push, the game auto-play mechanism went into overdrive and pretty much built most of the track just as I was getting into a position to do so myself. I love this game but it is very easy to lose sight of what you need to do, I certainly made some schoolboy errors on a couple of rounds but that was mostly due to me not paying attention. Final Scores: Barry & Chris:75, Paul:57 and Nick:53
	Having promised Colin I would bring my copy of Aztlán for him to have a try at, this was our next game of the day. Players represent one of 4 tribes vying for the favours of the Gods as they strive to remain in the blessed lands. Essentially an area control game where you have the chance to peacefully co-exist in areas, for which you are rewarded with a gift from the Gods, or you can force the other tribe(s) out if you have more power. On each turn you select a card from your hand, all players have the same set, and this grants your power this turn as well as determining which terrain is special for you. In order to score that round you need to create a domain of linked terrain (each tribe member must be adjacent to another) which also includes at least one of the type on your card. The scoring is a little convoluted but they do provide a handy table on the back to make this easier. The artwork is really great and the components of excellent quality, the only shame is as you get further into the game the board gets really busy so it can be a little hard to keep track of what is going on. That said I really enjoyed the game. There was a lot of early peaceful existence in this game as people collected favours from the Gods but it all started to get brutal near the end game with Sarah dealing out some harsh treatment in the final rounds which ultimately aided her strong position into a resounding win! Final scores: Sarah:133, Colin:122, Paul:112 and Nick:111
	Next up was Mission: Red Planet This is always a pleasure to play. The rules are simple to pick up and there is a very good mix of luck and strategy involved. The objective is to get you Astronauts onto the various areas of Mars. As you land you uncover one of three different types of Ore valued 1-3. During the game there are three scoring rounds 5,8 and the last round 10. On the first scoring round the player with the most Astronauts in an area gets 1 scoring token (that matches the Ore in that area) if there are any ties the token stays on Mars. In the second scoring round 2 tokens are awarded, ties split the tokens and any remainder stays on Mars. Finally in the third scoring round 3 tokens are awarded, ties re split as before with the remainder being discarded. During the game there are different roles that people can use which give them different actions they can take, some just have a useful purpose to the player, others also allow the player to destroy spaceships, remove astronauts and other sneaky tricks. During the game you can collect event cards, these provide you with either additional Bonus points usually through having some conditions to be met or Discovery cards that change some aspect of one of the outer zones on Mars. Some of these have benefits and some provide detrimental affects to an area. These are only revealed at the end of the game so it can be quite nasty! The game is played over 10 rounds and once you have played a particular character you can not play it again unless you use the recruiter character which gets you all your character cards back into your hand(including the recruiter). It becomes quite strategic as to when to use this card!. The theme is very well done for this game and the pieces are extremely colourful and well made. Now I'm not sure where my head was at in this game, I've played this a lot and I own it but this was not my copy so the I should lose my own game should not apply . For some reason I just got everything wrong, got the roles wrong, failed to get on the right places on Mars and pushed using the recruiter till far too late in the game to do any good. My score was so low for this game I am really embarrassed to event post it, but I will. Final Scores: Sarah:56, Colin:40, Chris:34, Nick:12 and me:5!!
	Finally for the Saturday we played Kingdom Builder which I always enjoy playing and I never seem to tire of. This is a real gem of a game that will see a lot of time on the table for me, I love the way it plays and the fact that no two games will be alike. The total game time is reasonable and the game does not drag it always feels quite pacey. There are real decisions to be made here as well as opportunities for strategy, there is a degree of player interaction as your placements can seriously disrupt other players plans. We had mostly Nomads tiles for this game, which made it interesting, with an instant score for building the mandatory 3 in a straight line. The other scoring was for each horizontal line and for joining the special places together. Great game where there were early points to be grabbed plus a couple of the nomad one-off tiles were point scorers so there was an early race to get them. In the end the final scores were: Chris:59, Paul:47 and Nick:45 which was pretty close considering.
	Sunday started a bit slowly, probably helped by a late night, late meal and BEER   but I digress. Started the day eventually with London a Martin Wallace game which I am sure I saw being played on the Wednesday nights at Spirit Games some time ago but had not tried myself. Really enjoyed this, despite making some early bad decisions leaving me both poor and earning me a lot of poverty points (not good trust me). The game follows the rebuild of London after the Great Fire and players either build up their city, run their city or build buildings in a district of London. You lay cards in front of you to show what you have built but to place them you have to discard a card of the same type to a common display that will then be available to other players to take. Each card has an ability it will provide if you run it when you run your city. Some of these have costs and they provide money, VP's, reduce your poverty etc. After you run your city you calculate how much poverty that generates which is how big your city is (number of stacks of cards) plus what is left in your hand. The rules are not that complicated and most of the cards are self-explanatory but there is a lot to think about here. Timing of when to take certain actions are crucial and whilst you can and do need to get loans in this game, here as in life being stuck with loans is costly. Great game, good company and I did not do nearly as badly as it felt during the game. Final scores: Terry:104, Jackson:63 and Paul:28 (but still positive   )
	Last game of the day was Terra Mystica we played this at the last B&P but it has just been released in the UK by ZMan and we bought a copy. So this was an opportunity to refresh our knowledge of the rules, so having badgered Nick into bringing his copy we set aside the afternoon to play this. This gave me time to wake up and get my brain ready to get back into this. This is a slightly more complicated game than most and whilst the explanation was necessarily longer once we got down to playing it all started to come back and make sense after the first round or two. Players are controlling races trying to build cities as well as building up status in various cults, each race has its own unique abilities and bonuses. Each player has their own board which controls all aspects of their game which is quite neat. Each round their is a specific goal which will earn you bonus VP`s, each race has to build on certain terrain so the first order of business is to terraform the landscape in order to build your city. This time I was playing the Giants and despite a good head start I managed to not play to my Races strength, thus started to fall behind as the others quickly got the hang of theirs. That said I still really enjoyed this, it is not a short game but the time passes by without you really noticing as you concentrate on your plans. There is plenty of player interaction, some of which involve actually helping other players to score whilst furthering your own efforts. It is not an easy game to summarise but it is great fun and a challenge to play and I look forward to trying this again with a different race. Final scores: Nick:89, Gary:72, Neil:68, Caz:56 and Paul:46

A big thankyou to everyone I got to play games with and it was also great to have a chance to catch up with some old friends. I hope everyone else enjoyed it as much as I did and I hope to see you all again at next years event.


Here is the Slideshow of Saturdays Event:


Here is the Slideshow of Sundays Event: