13th November 2024
It was a four table night with 14 gamers trying out three games new to club and four old favourites.
Starter games for the week were Kingdomino now on its 11th club session, Seven Dragons on its ninth session and Welcome to the Moon, also on nine sessions.
A recent play of Welcome to the Moon had stocked the rockets (the first scenario), in this session we launched off and had to plot a trajectory to land on the moon (the second scenario). The same 3 stacks of cards with numbers and symbols are the source of your options for a turn, but this time all the resources (symbols) do different things. Energy is important for splitting up the trajectory into chunks so you can play down the numbers in ascending order, as there are more than 15 spots for numbers! And the other resources, like robots, leaves and water can help score victory points. The other two resources can be used as wild resources once you have collected enough.
Jeremy taught some new recruits and some previous rocket stockers - Darren, Iain, Steph, Dave and Graham. The journey was quite daunting at first with so many unfilled spaces and what to try and get first. Soon the daunting task turned a bit easier after a few rounds as things became clearer, with people claiming space stations and picking up water on route. But then things become a might trickier and energy for journey breaks and getting the right numbers proved difficult for a few players - causing some system errors. Jeremy thought he had completed the trajectory track, but was premature as he had one space left on the moon! So in the end Jeremy and Steph managed the whole journey, but Steph had maximised her points on route so came out as best rocket Captain.
After those warm up games it was time for the longer games.
Reynaldo was keen to play Fresco and once he had set it up soon had willing volunteers to start competitive painting.
Do you consider Michelangelo overrated? Think you could have done a better job on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel given the opportunity? Well, Fresco is your chance to put your brush where your mouth is and find out. Sort of.
Themed on painting the ceiling of a Renaissance church (Italian of course), Fresco is a worker placement game which sees players compete to reveal parts of the hidden design by removing the tiles covering it at the start of play. To do so, they must first buy and mix paint to match the specific colour combination required for each tile from a palette of 8 colours. Tiles which only need primary colours score low VPs, while using secondary colours which must be mixed (green, purple and orange) score more. However the most points come from using pink and brown, which have to be mixed from secondary colours and so are more expensive and time consuming to produce. Players take the role of master painters and each starts with 5 apprentices who do much of the leg work including going to the market to buy paint, mixing it as well as painting the church under the master’s supervision.
The number of apprentices can go down to 4 or rise to 6 depending on how demanding the master is in deciding when the working day starts. Force them to get out of bed at 5am and sooner or later one of them will slope off. Let them lie in until 9am and you may find that another one joins you, but you probably won’t get as much painting done. This part of the game is reminiscent of the wake-up track in Viticulture which determines the order in which players will take their turns. The twist in Fresco is that not only do you risk losing workers, but you will pay 4 times as much for your paint if you choose 5am rather than 9am, when the market is almost giving the stuff away. 6am, 7am and 8am are compromises between the two extremes but 9am is the only start time the apprentices actually like, although you can also improve their morale by giving them time off for an occasional trip to the theatre.
Owner Reynaldo (blue) talked Neil O (red), newcomer Kate M (green) and Steve L (yellow) through all this and then it was time to determine initial player order on the wake-up chart. Most went for a balanced approach but Steve decided to go in hard for a 5am start, immediately sacrificing one of his work-shy apprentices for the dubious privilege of paying top price for his paint but having first pick of the market stalls. At the end of round 1, nobody had painted anything but Steve was the only one with a burned-out workforce and no money. Still, the paint store was looking nice and, as any decent boss should know, it is much easier to crack the whip first and then lighten up than do it the other way round.
Reynaldo was the first to actually apply some paint and shot ahead on the VP track, but the others soon recovered with the lead changing hand several times. Mid-game saw the yellow pieces edge in front and then begin to pull away, although whether or not this was thanks to the first round early start wasn’t clear. Then, just as Steve was starting to dream of a yellow win, Reynaldo showed he had more paint in stock than a Dulux warehouse and also owned a paint roller with an extension arm, removing multiple tiles to score a bucket load of VPs and surge ahead. As competition for the last few tiles came to a head, Reynaldo swapped his paint roller for a spray gun and moved out of sight on the VP track. Neil, who had been lagging, put on a late spurt to close the gap but it fell to Kate to grab the last tile, much to the audible frustration of Steve who had thought he was the only one with the right paint to do it. Final scoring was tense (at least if your name isn’t Reynaldo), with only 5 VPs covering the also ran places and yellow just pipping green by a single point. So, a great win for Reynaldo but perhaps someone should remind him that the natural order of things is for the teacher of a new game to lose. And heavily at that!
Steph had brought Apiary, a game with a good reputation but its first time out at club. Humans no longer inhabitant the Earth another sentient species has filled the void, the Mellifera or highly advanced honeybees. There are twenty unique factions in this worker placement game; build your hive, gather resources and develop technology and explore planets. You need to develop your faction over a year and get the most victory points before you need to hibernate.
Kathy J. taught another game new to club Aquatica. This is a deck builder game with an underwater theme. Each turn players select a role card from their original deck of six or a King card with a unique role to make it a little asymmetric. With a similar mechanism to Concordia each round you have a diminishing selection of roles to use until you use the Matrona role to pick up all the used ones to your hand again. Roles let you acquire location cards either with coin or by force.
The variation that Aquatica adds compared to other similar games is the locations move to your game board which has five slots and you slide the new card in up to its first bonus icon. Then there is a card rising mechanic where you can use those bonuses to enhance future role actions, e.g. extra money or power but then slide the card up to cover up that bonus but allow use of the next one. When the card is slid all the way up then the location can be converted to treasure using another action and its victory point score is now active for the end of the game, and you might earn bonus mantas. However some cards have gaps in their bonus tracks so you need to use push up actions from other cards or your manta tokens to unblock them. You can also acquire new roles for your hand with different actions or combinations of actions available. The game ends after either the location or role deck runs out or a player has achieved all four of the end game goals. When a player meets an end game goal on their turn they can sacrifice one of their four starting mantas to claim that and the faster you claim the more victory points it is worth.
The game plays in about 30 minutes once the rules have been explained, so we played a first game with the basic end game goals and a random King card and a second game with different goals and drafting the King cards. Jack really got the hang of chaining bonuses together and ended both games by claiming all four end game goals first, in fact catching us out in the first game by managing two in one turn. The basic gameplay is quite simple to teach for those reasonably familiar with this sort of game but there is some depth due to the multiple ways to score victory points and variability with the different goals and cards available.
Meanwhile Jeremy J. got Res Arcana out for its sixth club play - see 80 and 17 for the rules overview. Two new budding wizards - Iain as a Healer and Graham as a Seer, and an old mage - Jeremy as a Duelist, tried their hand at this game of duelling magic users. As usual it takes a while before this game clicks, its an engine building game using artifacts, monuments and places of power to form the parts that you can activate and power up to achieve victory.
Iain had managed to play a set of artifacts that generated death and water magic that he could use to power up his Blood Isle in a very nice way getting to 12 victory points before the game ended. Graham struggled to make a single engine, but put together an elaborate interplay of multiple monuments, artifacts and 2 places of power to get to a possible 11 victory points. Jeremy started off struggling to get enough mana and regretted his decision to buy a Sacrificial Pit but then things fell into place and he managed to power that up enough and buy 3 monuments to secure a win with 14 points!
The next session is the 27th of November, it will be our last session of the year before a break for the festive holiday season and it will be our annual charity night. On these sessions the club covers the room hire costs and the door fee becomes a donation for a local charity as well as any extra money raised through the bake sale or games raffle. This year we will be supporting EACH (East Anglia Children’s Hospice). Do come along if you can, it is a nice way to end another great year of gaming in St Ives.
- Total Session Attendance: 14
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Board Games: