2nd April 2025
Fourteen gamers joined us for more space based gaming terraforming or looking for alien life with a side helping of psychics, tiling, mining and courtly intrigue.
SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence had been booked on Discord and had a full table of four all looking for traces of life beyond Earth. Players launch probes to explore planets and moons and choose when to land to get samples or survey from orbit. Players can also use telescopes to gaze at distant star systems to detect alien traces and signals. Once you detect life you have to utilize technological advancements that you can make during the game to make the most of your discoveries to be able to make the biggest scientific discovery!
The other tables started on shorter games Azul and Courtisans and Saboteur.
It was a fourth play for Azul first played in session 6 but last on the tables in session 54. Kathy J. taught three newcomers the rules and everyone was soon selecting tiles and trying to place them on their walls. Annalee and Graham did well grabbing colours they could tile adjacent to those previously placed and didn’t get caught out with tiles that didn’t fit but Graham got the win.
Courtisans is a game of altering the fortunes of aristocratic houses, and trying to get the most benefits from it. Essentially each player has to play their whole hand of 3 courtisan cards, then they draw 3 more cards before the next player does the same. One courtisan is played to influence the house’s power in the centre of the table - either negatively or positively. The second courtisan goes to you, and the last courtisan goes to another player. Each player gets one point for each courtisan they have at the end of the game that is to do with a house that has a positive influence, and minus one point for negative houses. Some courtisans are worth double points, or can assassinate others from the game or are spies hidden from view, and everyone has some secret objectives. All these simple rules combine together to make it an intriguing game to work out how best to deal with what everyone else is doing, let alone what you should be doing!
After that quick game we decided to have a go at another short game - Saboteur. This is a hidden traitor game, or specifically with 5 players there can be 1 to 2 saboteurs. The idea is that the miners are trying to dig and find some gold, there are 3 possible locations to tunnel to, but the saboteur(s) are trying to stop the miners by making them run out of tunnel cards before they get to the gold. Apart from tunnel cards there are cards that allow you to break or mend other players mining equipment, or peak at a potential gold location or even collapse an existing tunnel (oh no!). It usually plays over multiple rounds where the miners and saboteurs are randomised, and the winner is the player who managed to get the most gold by mining and saboteuring over the rounds played.
Then gameplay moved onto Planet Unknown back from session 96. We used a symmetrical setup and so all had the same planets and corporations but the game box comes with a good selection of different difficulty choices of these that can give a lot of variety for future gameplay. The new players picked up the rules quite quickly and were happily spinning S.U.S.A.N the satellite to get different polyomino pieces to add to their planets surface, sending their rovers out to collect life pods and meteorites and getting on with their secret goals.
The game lasted until the final twentieth round which was also when the first person was unable to place a polyomino. Scores were reasonably close but did tip in favour of the two previous players who were a bit more experienced in placing and prioritising the tile selections for best effect.
Then the tables finished off with another new game to club - Hansa Teutonica: Big Box and back for the third time - Mysterium Park.
One corner of the club is going back, back to a time of great euro-games with little to no theme, middle of the road art, and uninformative names. This week, Hansa Teutonica: Big Box from 2009 (although we played the rather nice recent edition from 2020). Of the five players, two had played before but not for about a decade - one of the experienced took the day. The key to the game is balancing in-game and end-of-game scoring, since in-game scoring is one of the end-game triggers (that sentence does make sense); so it’s a race between players to end the game at the right moment. The other two end-game triggers are about bonus tokens and filling up spots on the board, which you can also engineer if you work hard enough. What is the game really? Claiming spots on the board in cities - which are permanent - by claiming the routes between cities - which are removed each time you complete the route.
You get a number of actions each turn to put things on the board. All players start the same, but have individual upgrade tracks that make certain actions more powerful… so quickly one player will be able to place in cities the others cannot, or one player can shuffle their pieces around more quickly. Upgrade too much though and you might not have time to use them (as someone else has raced to trigger the end of the game). You’ll note that nowhere in this paragraph do I explain the theme or “what the players are doing”, because honestly it’s not really there. What Hansa Teutonica does give you is a tight game of getting in each others way, the game is on the board and players are looking at what everyone is doing all the time; why did they put that cube on that route?, will I get that city first?, and will I get my network finished before the game ends? It does take a while to get into the flow of the game (moving cubes from reserves, to supply, to the board, and then back to the reserves), and the scoring is not exactly intuitive for the end game - but this is a classic game.
The ghost was back at the deadly amusement park trying to inform three physics about a murder in Mysterium Park. This time the visions started well with the suspects and locations successfully eliminated in just four rounds but then the final vision proved confusing and the wrong staff member and location were unfortunately identified. Never mind, I’m sure the ghost will be back for another try.
The next session is the 16th April, the clubs 100th game night. Join us for another evening of varied games or suggest what you would like to play on this milestone night in advance on Discord.
- Total Session Attendance: 14
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Board Games: