5th March 2025
Seventeen gamers joined us for a night focused on longer games about efficient work practices, art dealing or surviving the horrors of Cthulhu or Aliens.
Games by Vital Lacerda have been popular at club recently and there were two pre-booked on Discord before the session, Kanban and The Gallerist.
Kanban was back for its third play. Steph H won. Again (see Blog 86 and 87 for how the game works and past plays).
2 ½ hours earlier. Another day at Pink Chrysanthemum Motors as the early shift clocks on. With Steve L returning from his sick leave to join co-workers Steph and Darren C, the shift should have been complete but there was no sign of Sandra’s pet (Jyo K). Rumours of an unauthorized day off to visit an art gallery somewhere were soon flying about, but management quickly stepped in and assigned apprentice Lee to fill the vacant slot. After that it was down to business.
The first few rounds saw Steve stick close to factory boss Sandra, spending his time swotting up to improve his technical knowledge in whichever department (R&D, Assembly, Logistics, Design and Admin) she was likely to appraise next. It worked for a while, as this avoided the loss of Production Points the others were suffering, giving him an early lead. However, as corporate climber Steph pointed out, that was no way to win the game. This became apparent at the first weekly meeting when Steph and Darren talked endlessly about what they had been up to while Steve and Lee had nothing to say. Both had struggled to get cars into their garage with Lee in particular sitting on a lot of shiny red designs, which looked great on paper but had nothing you could actually attach wheels to.
Things improved a bit for the back markers as the game went on, but by this time Steph had built a commanding lead and was virtually out of sight. Steve tried a late gambit, using four shifts to become an instant expert in Admin, but Sandra was unimpressed as Steph swooped in to claim the points there as well. So, a clear win for Steph with 136 Production Points, while the others were clustered around the 100 mark and thinking of heading off to the canteen for more doughnuts as a consolation prize.
The Gallerist was back again, this time for a four player dance with seasoned player, teacher, and owner Jyo introducing more people to the weird and wonderful world of art - through the lens of Lacerda. At it’s heart, The Gallerist is a worker placement game with a race to trigger the end-game conditions. The pace of this play felt a bit off, likely a small imbalance in actions somewhere in the early game led to a rather strange (in Jyo’s experience) situation with the meeple supplies with respect to the tickets (which are used to move the meeples around the board). Despite the strange pacing, there was a lot of “oh, that’s how that works” moments, which is the hallmark of Lacerda games where all the various mechanisms link up to gain you greater action efficiency, speeding up the game, gaining you more action bonuses, etc. etc.
When the oil on the canvas was dry, it appeared that a long-shot “full gallery” play had snuck the win… it was very close.
Neil O. had brought his copy of Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps! so the club could try scenario two in the campaign. Things had not gone very well in the first attempt at this cooperative survival game in session 81, but miraculously the team were alive but separated and ready to face the Aliens again. We had 2 players back from the first game (Neil as Frost, James as Vasquez), joined by 3 first timers (Dave as Ripley, Kathy as Hudson and Jeremy as Gorman). We may have misinterpreted or forgotten a few of the rules but sometimes in our favour and sometimes not, so these mistakes probably balanced out. Four of the marines had become separated from Lt Gorman, Ripley and Newt, who were conveniently in the crashed APC with a computer right by the exit. Less conveniently the win condition was for at least one of the four privates to survive and escape the nest of twisting tunnels full of slavering Aliens and reach the exit too.
Things started well with Vasquez almost single handedly obliterating the first posse of Aliens blocking the corridor with the Smart gun, letting the privates head off as fast as possible. Lt. Gorman and Ripley decided to venture into their end of the corridor and try and keep the nearby spawn point under control. Gorman spent the majority of the game rolling terribly and watching Ripley kill all the spawning Aliens. Meanwhile Newt (a non-player character) was safe in the APC with the computer mashing the keyboard and failing to do any useful Alien scanning due to her poor tech skills (for future scenarios we will remember that Newt could be persuaded to just sleep through the chaos as the Rest action would have been more helpful to recycle cards and extend the game time!).
The troop were about halfway to the exit when the difficulty started to increase and Aliens were appearing multiple times from each spawn point, remembering the tunnels and the ceilings and it was impressive how many times the blip token turned out to have 5 Aliens on one hex, presumably all acrobatically balancing on each other. Vasquez again was critical for thinning out their numbers, as was the flamethrower wielded by Frost, but disappointingly the grenade thrown by Hudson turned out to be a damp squib as another series of poor dice rolls failed to decimate an accumulation of Aliens. Somehow by using every special card and just having enough endurance the whole team made it out. “Game Over, Man!, Game Over!”.
Elder Sign made its first appearance at the club, a modern classic released in 2011 set in the Arkham Horror universe. A dice based, cooperative game, each player takes charge of an investigator trying to stave off the emergence of an Ancient One. As the game progresses players move to different locations, rolling dice to defeat monsters, collect items and acquire the all-important Elder Signs to keep the Ancient One sealed away.
After setup and a depressingly long teach while Rich tried to remember the rules, we got to work battling to keep Nyarlathotep at bay. Rich started strongly early in the game, but came unstuck thereafter. The rest of the team suffered defeat in their first battles, but rallied. The team relied heavily on Graham and Joe’s good dice rolling to keep them in the game. Sophie’s character died near the end (not the end of the world in Elder Sign, you get a new character and keep on fighting) and Graham won the game by purchasing the final Elder Sign needed just in time.
Since the game was out and everyone was familiar we decided to play again, this time facing the great Cthulhu. Thankfully the dice gods smiled upon us and we were able to win the game fairly easily, defeating the Great Old One without breaking a sweat. It’s always great when a plan comes together.
The next session is the 19th March, do keep an eye on Discord in the days before to see what games are being suggested and book your seat if they tickle your fancy. Or just turn up and see what is on the table to select from.
- Total Session Attendance: 17
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Board Games: