19th February 2025
It was another thirteen gamer night with more space themed games but also trains, ninjas and stained glass.
On Mars made its highly anticipated return to the club for a second round, this time with a four-player crew. The dynamics shifted significantly as Lee G joined the table, bringing his prior experience with the game, albeit from a long time ago, while Jyo K, Steph H, and Iain D returned, all eager to refine their strategies after the first session. This time, the game got off to a quick start, as everyone already knew the rules, and the players could jump straight into their plans. Each player took a unique approach, setting the stage for a tense, strategic contest on Mars. Iain opted for an early strategy of buying a lot of blueprints, hoping to create a strong foundation for future development, Steph focused on building crucial structures for the colony, contributing to Mars’ growth while securing valuable points, Jyo doubled down on acquiring advanced tech, aiming to leverage the powerful upgrades and Lee chose to recruit scientists, knowing that these would eventually tie into upgraded buildings and potentially provide a late-game surge.
The variety in strategies made for an exciting game, and at one stage it felt that Jyo and Steph were racing ahead, consistently racking up points through their focus on tech and building. Meanwhile, Lee and Iain seemed to lag behind, struggling to score many in-game points. But just as the game neared its conclusion, Lee’s strategy began to pay off in a big way. His recruitment of scientists, whose points were linked to the upgraded buildings that Steph, Iain and Jyo were working on, allowed him to leapfrog everyone during the final scoring phase and was enough to secure him the win, beating Jyo by just a few points in what was a nail-biting finish.
The other space game this session was another new one Planet Unknown which lets six players take on the role of corporations terraforming their planets simultaneously. The theme is that a Space Station called S.U.S.A.N (Simultaneous Unit Selection Axial Node) supplies ready terraformed land configurations (polyominoes with 2 terrain types each) to your barren planet. For each type of terrain you install you increase your power (tracker) in that field, unlocking benefits, such as civilisation bonuses, synergy boosts, technology levels and rover mobility. You have one or more rovers you can unlock allowing collection of life pods on your planet (before you destroy them with terrain drops), and meteors that unfortunately impact some of your terraform modules during transit.
Each turn a beneficial or detrimental event occurs, changing your trackers or affecting your terrain or rover placement. Then the lead player rotates S.U.S.A.N. to a beneficial position to select one of 2 terrain configurations to place on their planet, everyone else installs a different terrain module based on what they can see on their side of S.U.S.A.N. Once installed they advance their trackers, unlock their bonuses and the lead moves on. The game ends when the event deck runs out or someone can’t place any of the modules on their planet. Scoring comes from completing rows or columns of your planet (without any pesky holes or meteors!), how far up the tracks you made it, civilisation bonuses and how many pods and meteors you collected.
This was an introductory game for most, and everyone was having terraforming fun on their planets trying to work out good placement strategies and to also try and score from their neighbouring objectives - shared between two adjacent players - such as most meteors collected or largest biomass land terrain. The game ended a few turns short of the event deck due to Richie being given a choice of terrains that would not fit. The final score had Jack and Jeremy just pip the other players to a tied result due to completing both their objectives. A quick game to teach and a fairly short play time will mean this will easily return at future sessions!
The final table had a quick game of Spots while waiting for the terraforming to finish. It was the second club outing for this simple dice and push your luck game, back from session 92. Iker took too many chances, Simon was hoarding the bones but the dice were not falling his way with the re-rolls they allowed, so it was Kathy’s more slow and steady banking of completed spotty dog cards that was victorious.
Then the two tables rearranged into five trading trains in West Riding Revisited and four building stained glass windows in Sagrada.
West Riding Revisited is another Winsome game that has been reprinted by Rio Grande Games (there’s a theme of train games at the club, many of them listed in the blog for the 93rd session; with the RGG reprints being a recent phase). West Riding Revisited from 2010 is a reworking of, as expected West Riding from 2008 (or earlier - this original game is lost to the world, only a few people own it), and WRR has long been unobtainable. Most Winsome games were made in limited numbers, typically mostly available in the US, and subsequently sold for silly money on the second-hand market. So it is nice to see RGG getting these old games back in print, they are however not giving these new releases any pizzazz (very much a bare-bones approach). It must also be said that most Winsome train games are weird experiments in game mechanics, not all of them are “game of the year” material, but many often are.
So West Riding Revisited is, unusually for train games, based in the UK (up North). There are two types of railway companies with shares: basic (six, with three per grouping) and grouping (two). The theme of the game is buying basic shares to improve the board position of the grouping companies - which claim towns/cities where two of their basic railways meet; there are some quirks about building track on the map, but it’s essentially a set of auctions for the basic shares and trying to maximise the number of towns/cities claimed by the grouping company. The basic railways steadily become worse as the game progresses, but you can trade 2-for-1 basic into grouping (again with a quirk about some shares being non-tradable). The whole arc of the game is getting basic shares to trade for grouping shares, which then make lots of money.
Five of us sat down to play, all starting with a rather meagre £7, and after 35 auctions (one per player for seven rounds) and just over 2 and a half hours the winner ended up with £147. Understanding the route building - and blocking - is tricky until it starts to unfold in round 3 and 4. Starting and winning the right auctions is the heart of the game (to get the trades for grouping shares); and once you’ve hit round 4 or 5 you can see where it has gone wrong. There were some high and low points in the game, as everyone felt their way through this strange set of auctions and the strange board. As with most auction games, a second play would be very different… but the final spread of scores was actually quite close: 147, 145, 144, 112, and 102.
Sagrada was on its seventh club play but the first time Kathy had managed to give this variant on a yahtzee style dice rolling and banking game a go, thanks to Jack for teaching. Each round the first player rolls two coloured dice per player plus one (i.e. 9 in a four player game) and selects one dice to add to their window then selections go round the table and back again, so each round you gain two dice in your window, repeat ten times and your window should be full. Seems simple but there are some dice placement rules, no dice of the same colour or number to be adjacent and you have a card setting some locations in your window to a certain colour or number. There is one personal secret objective per player based around extra points for one colour of dice and three public objectives about different combinations of dice in your final window and some tools that can help change dice numbers or swap them around to help score more or prevent a gap in your window.
It was all going quite well until the final round where spaces in the window are quite restrained, Kathy was first player and had first choice of the dice but in a disastrous roll none of the nine dice were a one or six, which were the only numbers that would fit and she only had one tool option left so she finished with a gap (minus one point) and failed to score a public goal as planned. Everyone else managed to complete their windows and, apart from Kathy, the scores were quite close on the public objectives, so it was down to the private objective reveal to crown the master window builder. Which was Jack who had managed to incorporate a lot of his secret colour into the public scoring patterns. A simple concept game but with a bit of strategy and chance involved to make it interesting.
After Sagrada the table moved onto cooperative deep sea diving with The Crew: Mission Deep Sea. This reimplementation of The Crew: Quest For Planet Nine which has been played at the club four times before is a variant on traditional whist style trick taking games. The twist being that each round the players are given missions to cooperatively solve and accomplish, like a specific player needing to win a certain card or to win the first and last trick. Missions get increasingly difficult and a story is available to provide the theme. We managed 5 missions and only one do over before some divers decided it was time to retire for the night.
The late stayers joined up for a six player game of club favourite Ecosystem and then the final two waiting for the train trading to finish tried Ninja Camp. Jack triumphed at Ecosystem with a meadow, bee and bear heavy strategy but enough diversity to get a good score in that category. While Neil’s armadillo ninja’s were victorious against Kathy’s platypus’s in this move and collect cards until no moves are left game, first played in session 11.
The next session is the 7th March, what games and diverse themes will be on offer then? If you want to influence the choices then suggest a game beforehand in the Discord channel and we will try and arrange it.
- Total Session Attendance: 13
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Board Games: