10th July 2024
Despite having to choose between watching a Euro ball game or playing a Euro board game, eleven gamers turned out for a three table session. They played a few of the club favourites and one new game of exploration.
The session started by filling a table of six for Welcome to the Moon. This is the seventh play of this flip and write game and the players soon got the hang of using the number and symbol combination choices to fill their rockets and then triggering completed compartment bonuses. However James T. worked out the best strategy for using the numbers and filling his rocket to blast off first while the others were about three quarters done.
The second table got out the ever popular starter game Ecosystem now on its 24th outing at club.
Then the long games started with Lost Ruins of Arnak quickly gaining four explorers and the remaining six taking on co-op Zombicide. Then when Simon W. arrived two players handed over their characters and defected to try Dokmus an abstract strategy game.
Always a popular game, a fresh team of intrepid archaeologist adventurers assembled to tackle the jungles of a not so newly discovered Pacific island in yet another search for remnants of the lost civilization of Arnak. The group comprised various Indianas - Phones (Iain D, who used his to keep us updated on the England game going on somewhere in the background), Drones (Ryan H-G, who found far more undiscovered sites than anyone else and so MUST have been relying on aerial surveillance to do so), Moans (Steve L, who ensured the other players knew every time Ryan had pinched the site he was just about to move to) and Alones (Sophie F-W, who was without I. F-W on the night and otherwise managed to avoid providing anything better for cheesy word play like this). With a first-time player on board and two others who hadn’t played for some time, the setup was the easier Bird Temple side of the base game with no expansions used.
The aim of the game is to explore and excavate assorted ruins lost in the island’s jungle interior for millennia and then use the resulting archaeological finds as clues to advance up the research track. In this way, each adventurer hoped to be the first to reach the main temple and decipher its mysterious inscriptions, learning more about Arnak’s Arnakkian the people who once lived there, and advancing our understanding of this once great civilization. At least that’s what they claimed, but possibly it had more to do with just gathering shed loads of VPs?
The game got off to a brisk start, with everyone heeding teacher Steve’s urgings to prioritize the resources needed to make at least some progress up the research track during the first round. Soon, all magnifying glasses had reached the second level and (with one exception) notebooks were starting to follow. Although notebook progress doesn’t gain as many VPs as the magnifying glass, it does give access to some potentially very helpful assistants who can provide much needed resource boosts at just the right time.
Now, as every club veteran knows, the curse of being the rules teacher is real and has struck down many who have thought they were on to a good thing up against newbies in one of their favourite games. However, Steve had one of those vanishingly rare nights when everything seemed to fall into place and he had just the resources needed at just the right time (despite Ryan’s best efforts to thwart him and thanks in part to a very helpful parrot) to reach the Bird Temple almost at a sprint. This left ample time to study the inscriptions and gain another 17 VPs in the process, while the others tried to make up ground. A late spurt saw Sophie come in ahead of the rest of the pack, while Ryan seemed to be held back by the vast menagerie of subdued guardians that were following him around everywhere. Of Iain there was no definite news, but he was rumoured to be lost somewhere in the jungle along with his sea turtle. Still, he did at least have his phone so should be all right with GPS, won’t he?
Neil O. set up a reasonably simple sounding Zombicide scenario to teach a couple of new players. However things turned tricky from the very first round of Zombie spawns. The objective was to recover five stashes of supplies, of course they were spread across the map in five different buildings and past four Zombie spawn points and unfortunately half the characters had started armed with the worst weapon - a frying pan!
The team bravely opened the door of the nearest building and then stood back as the spawns included two Fattys with their Walker companions and the Abomination! Fatty’s require two damage points to kill and only one player had a weapon capable of such power in one strike, the fire axe. Where as an Abomination requires a molotov cocktail to do three damage and that requires getting into the buildings to search for supplies.
The next turns became a strategic test as some players made noise to distract some of the Zombies and limit the numbers pouring out of the original door, some took on the building Zombies and others dealt with the newly spawned Zombies lurching down the streets. Then they decided they had to open up a second building in the hope that would be easier and some better supplies could be found. Fortunately that building was slightly less infested but still it opened up a new front that required care to thin out the Zombie numbers without the players getting hurt. The team kept managing to survive, no fatalities, and made progress across the map but by the end of session time only two objectives had been recovered and they were running out of Zombies to spawn so it was decided the team had to bug out and call it quits.
Three players went to explore the wonders of the island of Dokmus. A brisk game of placing pieces to claim temples, which get you victory points. Rather like Kingdom Builder (which has never been played in-person at the club, but was common in our interim online days), all newly placed pieces must be adjacent to one of your pieces already on the board. Where Dokmus gets interesting, is that the board is made of eight tiles that the players can move and rotate; the island has an ever shifting landscape. The powers to alter the island are drafted at the start of each round, making for some hard choices about whether to cause a major shift in the board or go first to grab an important temple (for those all important points). After eight rounds of placing three pieces there is the final scoring.
After Dokmus there was a quick game of set collecting Subastral to finish the night.
The next session is the 24th of July, do contact us on Discord if you want to suggest or organise a specific game in advance, otherwise just turn up and see what varied game themes and types have been brought on the night.
- Total Session Attendance: 11
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Board Games: