Spirit Games Wednesday Night - 2010

[Zarniwoop]

6th Oct 2010

Tonight I played Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game with Philsy, I really liked this game the components are very nice and the the game is easy to pick up and play (although we only played the basic game). I played the Zombies and Philsy and Pete played the heroes, after the heroes making a bit of a dent in my zombie collection I managed to take down the 2 heroes I needed to win the game.

To end the evening we had a game of Battlelore which is a very good 2-player wargame in boardgame form. I like this game it is fairly easy to pick up and once you've played a turn it flows quite nicely. In the end Philsy one by 1 flag but after what started out looking like a whitewash for me, after getting a bad hand of cards, things turned round in the last part of the game and it was a close call. This makes for a great game the fact that it is all well balanced.

[Zarniwoop]

13th October 2010

Tonight we played Thurn and Taxis this is always a favourite, really good little game. Carole, Sally and myself played two games of this:
Game1: Sally 41, me 32 and Carole 18
Game2: Sally 45, Me 32 and Caole 28

We finished off the evening with a game of Bohnanza Sally 31, Me 27 and Carole 26.

[Zarniwoop]

27 Oct 2010

Tonight we played Galactic Emperor this is a really neat little space-empire buidling game which has some very nice models.

Myself, Phil, Philsy, Carole and new girl Helen had a go at this, with the following results:

Carole 24, Phil 23, Helen 22, Philsy 21 and Me 16.

Clearly I am not cut out as Galacic Emperor material

[Zarniwoop]

3rd November 2010
Tonight we played a game of Constantinopolis this was our first play of this with Philsy and myself figuring out the rules.

The game is very well made, the artwork and pieces superb. Players take the role of merchants shipping goods and passengers for profit, whilst selling goods at home, donating to the city, funding public buildings all to gain fame points to become the most renowned merchant in Constantinopolis.

The mechanics of this game are well done and add to the theme and enjoyment of the game, it starts with players vying for various roles in public office, each of which award the player with an extra ability or reward that turn. The players bid for these roles and the money is from all of this is placed back to the bank. The roles picked also determine player order for the rest of the round.

Given that both Philsy and myself had only partially read the rules this was relatively easy to pick up and play. I really enjoyed this and there is a lot of scope for different winning strategies. As always, as I own this game, I lost but the final scores were pretty close seeing as we all were learning and adopting different approaches. Philsy 45, Carole 35 and Me 30.

[carldjcross]

Oh Lordy it's been a while, September by my reckoning.

So by way of a catch up some vague impressions/hazy memories of recent gaming sessions:

October 20th

Imperial 2030 was of course played with a rule missing for the first two hours (this being our first stab at it and all) and proved to be much more fun when we discovered it was a take-that kind of game. Being able to steal countries from underneath their current owners noise obviously means that you're not too attached to them and encouraged lots of topic slashing burning; take the points and run.

Dog which is a kind of team Ludo with Cartegena mechanics. Luke and myself won that one.

November 11th

Navegador is a pick up and delivery game which Peter won but Julian did very well at. The market mechanic was particularly neat and is a kind of financial tug of war, except sometimes it's a good idea to let go.

November 17th

Olympus is Stone Age meets Dominion with a slice of Through the Ages thrown in for good measure. Players compete to win the favour of the Greek gods who turn out to be less impressive than Ray Harryhausen would have us believe since they just turn out to be resource mines. Each player also has a (I think unique?) deck of cards with lots of goodies he can build and there is another deck laid out in the middle of the board which anyone can build from.

Each player has the option of grabbing on to the toga-tails of the active player by choosing a 'beta' version of their power, usually less powerful than the 'alpha' version but can mean you can set up efficient combos in a single turn.

The quantity of cards can be a little overwhealming at first but then I suppose the same could be said of Dominion.

Lastly we played Dixit which is I can only describe as; whimsical rabbit, stones between my ears and Alice and Crow.

[carldjcross]

Wednesday 15th December

First up tonight was Great Fire of London 1666 kind of reverse area control game where the point is not so much to put the fire out in a namby-pamby cooperative way but rather to make sure it burns through someone else's property.

VPs are scored by protecting your own houses spread randomly around the board and by protecting 17th Century London landmarks. There's an element of bluffing here since your landmark cards are hidden information and the nearer Pudding Lane they are the more VPs they're worth.

The least effective way of scoring points seem to be actually putting out the fire which needs both your own pawn and one of the common fireteams around the board.

In our game the fire never really got going until the end of the game and was confined for much of it to the south east corner of the map. The reason for this was partly a mistake in setup (it's a new game) and partly because I think we weren't being aggressive enough.

Andy won although his convincing lead was only increased by a final round choice between blowing one of his own scoring buildings and one of mine. Must have been difficult.

Then we tried a game of Mad Zeppelin a Citadelesque role selection game. Our problem was that several of us were quite tired by this stage (me included) which only increased the time it took to choose roles in what was to most of us an unfamiliar game. I was winning when we stopped but only because of a few lucky card draws and being able to pick favourable roles which in a longer game would have balanced out.

An interesting game though and one to try again when we're a bit more awake.

[Zarniwoop]

10th Nov 2010
Tonight we had some of the new people playing and we broke out Pony Express which is a really fun bluffing/race game. This is a really funny game which always produces a good laugh. I got started setting up but had to bail for some teccy issue so Frog took over my place and went on to Win.

They then went on to play Buckets which is an old favourite which is always fun to finish the evening with.

[Zarniwoop]

17th Nov 2010
Tonight Philsy broke out his new shiny copy of Civilisation: The Board Game I have not played the computer game but was vaguley aware of it .

There are a lot of compnents to this game and all of them are of great quality with superrb artwork. There is a lot going on in this game but once you get a round or two under your belt you know what you need to do (more or less). There are multiple routes to victory and each nation has different strengths, our first game was quite peacful with no-one really being too aggressive, we never quite finished the full game as setting up time and rules explanation took its toll.

However, this was very enjoyable and Look forward to playing a full game of this. It will also be fun to try this with a full compliment of players to see how the dynamice changes.

Thouroughly recommend this as a game.

[Zarniwoop]

24th Nov 2010
Tonight we had a game of an older favourite: Missions Red Planet another game that I always like playing. I really love the Steampunk setting and feel to it, there is always a lot to think about on this one.

Scores for this were: Paul:32, Sal:36, Andy:32 and Caz:27

We then played a game of Alhambra which is essentially a tile laying game where you choose to buy a tile to place or take money to buy a tile on a subsequent turn. The twist is that each tile has to be bought with specific coloured money for the exact or higher money (no Change) if you buy it with the right money you get a second go. The tiles have to be placed in a certain way and you can hold pieces on your playing board but these will not then count during the scoring rounds only those played in your garden. A really fun game that will be worth repeat plays to try and improve.

Scores were: Paul:87, Sal:130, Andy:105 and Caz:65

[Zarniwoop]

8th Dec 2010
Tonight we broke out my shiny new copy of "The Great Fire of London 1666" The artwork on the board and cards is very good, the Hero of London card looks a little odd though. My board has warped slightly but this does not adversly affect playing the game.

The components are well thought out and suit the theme of the game, the rules are a little complicated but once you start playing they make a bit more sense. The game plays for a set number of turns as you build a deck of fire move cards based on the number of players with fire intensity cards dispersed in the deck. The idea is to protect your houses, whilst helping to put out fires across London. Each player also gets 3 secret missions to protect specific districts of London, if these areas still have house on at the end of the game the players scores the value of that card.

Unusually each player starts with some Victory points, this total is slowly eroded as play progresses as each of their houses that burns down reduces their score by 2.  This game was immense fun and the gameplay fits the theme really well, we managed to get a few of the rules wrong (there are a lot of things to remember).

On a Players turn they move the Fire, then they can take 4 actions either moving a Trained Band or their Landowner pawn or both (1 space per action), or put out fires in contained areas and Finally they take a new Fire Movement Card to take their hand back to 5 cards. This is the main part of the game and as this progresses the fire spreads through London damaging areas as it goes.

At the end of the game players total up what points they have left on the score track, plus any fires they have put out and any poinmts from the areas on their mission cards.

Final scores were: Paul:50, Simon:35, Philsy:50 and Sal:48.

I really like this game, but I think it will take a few more plays before we get all the rules down, a player aid would have been a useful addition to the game to remind players of the options and fire movement rules.

[Zarniwoop]

15th December 2010
As Carl has already mentioned we played "The Great Fire of London 1666" again this week. Having realised the rules we got wrong last time I felt ready to have another go, we had some new players this time round and we also had a full game. I have to say that it took approx the same amount of time with 6 as with 4 which is a good thing. It felt as good as the first game, but yet again we managed to miss a few rules, one during setup which made the fire spread a lot less and also during the game where we were putting out a lot more fires then we should have been.

That said I thouroughly enjoyed it again and there was a lot more interaction in this one as every house belonged to someone

I still feel people were being a little too polite to each other but I feel the 3rd game will be the charm, I have found a good little player aid on boardgamegeek which should help players remember their options.

[Zarniwoop]

22nd Dec 2010

Started off tonight with a popular game with the wed night crowd: Endeavor, this game is always consistently enjoyable and the final scoring relatively close.
Luke:38, Caz:40; Paul:43, Frog: 44 and the winner Sal:50.

We then had a quick game of buckets before frog has to scarper, this is another favourite and provides a good quick filler game. I managed to win this (not sure how).

Finally we had a crack at Metro a wonderful little game where you are laying tracks to score points. This is done by laying track tiles to lengthen your tracks and/or shorten your opponents, if you manage to complete your track to a station in the middle the score is doubled. Once all the track is laid and the final scores calculated the winner is the one with the most points. A lot can happen in the final rounds so this makes for quite a cutthroat tense game and it is great fun to play.

Phil:27, Caz:39, Luke:51, Sal:52 and I managed another win with 62