27th November 2024
Sixteen gamers joined us for the last session of the year and charity night. The donations, bake sale and games raffle raised £202 which will go to local charity East Anglian Children’s Hospices (EACH). Thanks to everyone who came and donated and helped us raise funds for local families with special healthcare needs. Between eating all the tasty treats we managed to play nine games, four new to club.
To explain the blog title, the first game of the night was For Sale a simple auction game about buying then selling property, out for it’s eighth time at club.
The other shorter game The Guild of Merchant Explorers is about exploring your map, establishing trade routes and searching for treasure. From your starting city you use the revealed terrain cards to place cubes on your map as long as they are connected to your city or other cubes you have placed. The aim is to complete areas of the map, travel to new lands to found new cities, or search for treasure on sunken ships on your travels. There are common objectives between players, the first to complete one will score more points than others. At the end of a round, all cubes are removed from your player map, so if you don’t establish new cities you have to start again from your first city!
Then we spread out over the tables and started playing some longer games.
Iain D. was keen for another try at Orleans so a three player game of this “bag builder” got underway. See blog 49 for a gameplay review. After a poor start for Kathy and Jeremy where the plague in the first round immediately killed off their new worker, the bags started filling with new and varied worker types. Iain focused on scholars and monks and was racing up the development track faster than the other two. Kathy got the right workers to keep her convoy of knights and merchants moving from town to town on the map and establishing guildhalls but struggled to make progress on any other victory point routes, particularly when the next plague killed off her first and brand new scholar. Jeremy was also making good progress establishing guildhalls in the south of the map and mostly kept ahead having the most farmers. He tried to use his bath house to swap workers drawn from his bag for others better matching his aims that round. In the end a bad taxes round for Iain meant he could not pay up and was tortured, which meant losing two workers. That probably tipped the balance and let Kathy and Jeremy catch up on the development track for an end game multiplier bonus. The scores were quite close but Kathy just won due to having the most guildhalls.
Ian and Sophie had brought Joyride: Turbo and the huge shiny new box attracted two more players. This is a car racing game, but cars have different abilities and you need to decide whether to push your luck and speed around the corners or smash into opponents to move them out of your way. There are tactical choices to make as damage to your car builds up and you might lose features or some of the items that you acquired and installed earlier in the race.
Jyo K, Richie W and Steve L gave River of Gold its official club debut after an off- piste 4 player game the week before which had ended in a narrow win for Richie. RoG is an action selection game themed on river trading in a fictionalised medieval era Japan, combining area control and contract fulfilment mechanisms in a relatively fast playing design. Or at least that’s what the players kept telling Jeremy J, who was trying his best to co-ordinate the next round of games as other tables finished and play dragged on.
Simple in concept, with a choice of one from among three possible actions, the devil is in the detail as players try to maximise rewards from each turn in a race against time before the end game mechanism kicks in. Available actions are to construct (build one of four types of buildings, each of which provides different owner and visitor rewards) in a vacant spot in one of the river’s six regions, sail a boat to a new space on the river to gain resources and/or other rewards or fulfil an order for trade goods (silk, porcelain and rice) to one of five customer types (again offering different benefits). But it is not all plain sailing though, as a D6 roll determines how far the boat could move and where a build or contract action could be taken. Players can modify the die up or down by spending divine favour, but there never seems to be enough of this, or so Steve complained (although the others didn’t seem to have a problem). Maybe he just didn’t hang around temples often enough or deliver trade goods to any monks?
Each of the six regions has its own influence track and players can advance on these by taking actions in a region. In game victory points are earned in several ways, mostly from visiting buildings or meeting public objectives (termed “masteries” in the game), but these don’t give a true picture of how well (or not) a player is doing as VPs ramp up dramatically after the end game is triggered. This happens when the reserve stack of building tiles is emptied, inevitably sooner than most players want it to. The focus then turns to the players’ positions on the six influence tracks, how many customers orders they have fulfilled and any final scoring bonuses these have earned.
And how did the game play out? Richie’s win in the first play-through was down to success on the influence tracks, outscoring the others despite Jyo getting maximum points (a whopping 27 of them) from completing six customer deliveries. As for Steve’s strategy then, well, the less said the better. This time round things were more balanced, with in game VPs fairly close and all players scoring the same for customer deliveries. However, Jyo did better on the influence tracks to nail a reasonably comfortable win, while Steve proved he had at least learned something from the previous game securing what he claimed was a respectable second place. Or first loser as Richie probably put it.
A three player game of Zombicide started but unfortunately had to be abandoned at the end of the night before it could be concluded if the horde of zombies was going to overwhelm the survivors or if they could acquire all the equipment they needed, that had of course been scattered all across the town.
Simon and Steph got stuck into a two player but hence bigger 7x7 grid version of Kingdomino, making its twelfth play at club.
Then as few games had finished almost simultaneously the tables reshuffled a bit and tried four player Harmonies and four player Spots.
Harmonies scores were quite close between the three new players but Steph’s experience showed as she had quite a commanding lead with good points scored for animals in biomes and terrain scores. It was a nice introduction to the game and showed off its variety and replayability once you have grasped the many ways to score and trade-offs between them. For instance Kathy got a good score from her meerkats but although they liked stone they didn’t like mountains so this reduced the points scored from the stone terrain.
Spots is a push your luck game of trying to put the right spots (dice spots) on 6 dogs before others manage it. Each turn you have one of 6 actions to choose from, unless they have already been claimed, which include getting another dog to put spots on, rolling dice (of course), getting bones (re-rolls), scoring your completely spotted dogs or digging up your stored dice. The trick to the game is to not bury too many dice in your back yard - it can only store a total up to 7. You have bury dice when you can’t use them on the dogs you are trying to spot. If you ever have to have bury than 7 you loose all the buried dice and those dice already placed on dogs. Its a fun push your luck game, and Simon our teacher showed us how to win at the game!
The next session is the 8th January, please join us for the first session of 2025. There will probably be some new games to try if Santa brought all the good club members presents. If anyone wants to organise a specific game beforehand leave a message on the Discord channel and you are likely to soon have people signing up for a seat.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from the Committee.
- Total Session Attendance: 16
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Board Games: