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Newcastle Gamers, 30th June

Newcastle, a few days earlier

Due to the odd number of weekends in June, inconveniently-timed visits from relatives, acts of god etc, this was my first trip to Newcastle Gamers for FIVE weeks (eek!). Fortunately the biblical-scale storms and floods of a few days earlier had (mostly) disappeared, and Circus Central was once again reachable by car, rather than by boat.

Phew.

This time, I played…

Village

Village is one of my recent acquisitions. It was a bit of an impulse purchase – I got an amazon voucher that I wasn’t expecting, and decided to blow it on a new game (of course!) … Village has been on the periphery of my games-that-I’m-sort-of-interested-in radar for a while, and the choice came down to either this, or Castles of Burgundy. While I was making my mind up, somebody else grabbed the last reasonably-priced copy of Castles … so, Village it was!

Village is one of this year’s three Kennerspiel Des Jahres nominees, and is usually described as a worker placement game. I think that’s probably due to lazy categorisation … visually, it *looks* like a worker placement game, and I guess it’s worker-placement-ish… but (taking my cue from a posting on BGG a few days ago), I’d argue that “action selection” is a far better description of what’s going on in this one.

Basically, the object of the game is be the most prestigious family in the history of the village. (OK, it’s not exactly the most originally-themed Euro of recent years, but stick with it…). The score track depicts unbound pages of a history book… so, the more you score, the more pages of history have been written about your family, which I thought was a neat touch. Your family members can gain points (i.e. pages of history) in a variety of ways… by becoming important members of the town council, working their way up the ranks of the church, being a successful craftsman/merchant, a successful farmer, or travelling to distant towns and exploring the world.

Mechanically, the game is driven by a chit-pull (well.. cube pull) kind of system. A bunch of coloured wooden cubes are randomly drawn from a bag, and placed on various spots around the board. Each colour corresponds to a different personality attribute – Green = Persuasiveness, Brown = Faith, Pink = Intelligence, Orange = Skill. There’s also a number of black cubes, which bring the plague to your family… which you’d instinctively think would be a bad thing, but there are actually unusual circumstances where killing off a family member at a particular time to get him into the history books *before* an opponent gets there can be a good thing. But yes, it’s still sort-of-a-bad-thing.

On your turn, you take a cube from one of the heaps, add it to your family’s supply, and then (optionally) take the action depicted on the board next to the area that you took the cube from (e.g. advance in a particular career, harvest crops, extend your family, start a market day… that kind of thing)

Some of the actions require the payment of cubes… so, for example, to get into the church, you might pay faith cubes. To do well at politics, you need persuasiveness… so your turn is a mixture of choosing an action spot that will directly benefit you *this* turn, while accumulating cubes that’ll fuel your plans for subsequent turns. It’s a good mechanism – it keeps the game moving briskly, but does give the game a much bigger decision tree than you would get if you were simply picking one of the 7 basic actions every round.

Oh.. there’s also death to think about! Most of the actions that you can take cost “time”. Once you’ve used up 10 points of time (depicted with a little hourglass track around your farm board), one of your oldest family members is destined to meet their maker. Whether they’ll go down in the village records (= points), or be buried in an anonymous grave (= not points) is something else you need to think about.

OK, I’ve already gone into more detail than I usually do while describing this one, and I’ve only just scratched the surface … rules-wise, it’s a medium-to-heavy game. This was the second time I’d played … the first time was a 2-player game against Mrs Shep (just to make sure I’d got the rules straight before I attempted teaching it to Newcastle Gamers!), and it seemed like an OK sort of game… probably not one of my all-time favourites, but worth having… the kind of thing I usually label with a 7/10 on BoardGameGeek.

However, the game I played on Saturday – a 3-player, vs Les and James, was *excellent*. I don’t know if that’s because the game gains a lot with the extra player, or because it took another play for things to click, or if it was just because of the particular way that the game played out that particular time … but it was a *really* good experience. About half-way through the game — after a particularly devious move had just been executed — Les turned to James with a big grin, and said “Are you thinking what I’m thinking??… I’m thinking we’re going to have to go home and buy a copy of this, aren’t we?”. Pretty high complement.

It was a very closely-scored game, even though we went for very different strategies. I played a crafting/selling strategy, James maxed out the ‘travelling the world’ mini game, and Les focussed on politics and church.

I won, by a whisker. Favourite game of the night.

Archaeology The Card Game

We were pondering what to play next, and Amo turned up with a copy of Archaeology in hand. It seemed like a nice, light option to fill in the gap while waiting for other games to end, so we blasted through a quick round. (Though, somehow, I ended up teaching this one too! – no wonder I was losing my voice a bit by the end of the night)

Notre Dame

Emma joined our table, and was keen to play Notre Dame. Apparently this was her second Notre Dame of the day … Emma *really* likes Notre Dame! (actually, the picture above is the earlier game, hence the 4 player config instead of 5). It was an interesting game; I don’t think I’ve played it with 5 before… actually, it was somewhat instructional to discover that everybody who had played before (3 different parties) had a *slightly* different interpretation of the rules (not a great advert for the clarity of Alea’s rulebooks!!). One quirk of this particular session was the way that we ended up playing with concealed message tokens … I wasn’t a fan of that; it makes the carriage action an entirely random exercise … I think the ability to scoop up a rat kill or gold coin with the carriage *just* when you need one is a pretty important aspect the game.

I read an article a few weeks ago which suggested that topping out your plague meter fairly early in the game isn’t — necessarily — a bad thing. I decided to test the theory. Verdict: topping out your plague meter fairly early in the game IS, in fact, a bad thing. A very bad thing. Oops!

Admittedly, my lack of success in executing the “don’t-care-about-rats” strategy *might* have been influenced by the fact that I was sitting next to James (Notre Dame is a card drafting game, so your ease of play is dictated — to a large extent — by the 2 players to your right). James played a *very* sharp game… accumulating 8 cubes on the residence square at one point, and thereby winning by an embarrassingly large margin.

Good to get another play of this under my belt though; it’s been a while!

Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small

I didn’t actually play this, but I’d promised to take along a copy for John F (previously known to this parish as (Different) John) to try out and learn how to play, and I’m always happy to help spread the joy… so I gave John F & Emma (neither of whom have played any variety of Agricola before) a quick run through the basics. I don’t think I missed out anything important… and they seemed to enjoy the game a lot.

Must remember to take proper Agricola to the next meeting – I expect that if they were impressed by Agricola:ACBAS, then Agricola:The Full Monty will be right up their street… 🙂

Forbidden Island

While I was explaining ‘gric, Brad set up a game of Forbidden Island at the other end of the table… “Just in case anybody fancies a game” (hint?). I’ve only played once before, and wasn’t enormously impressed with it that time, but it’s not a very long game, so I decided to give it a second chance.

We beat the game this time – in fact, it didn’t seem anywhere near as perilous/difficult as the first time I played (maybe down to the luck of the initial island configuration). I’m still not massively struck by Forbidden Island… which is odd, since it shares a lot of design features with Pandemic, which I rate highly. I guess that fact that it’s spatially simpler, and that it doesn’t have the “organic” disease growth of Pandemic makes the decisions a lot more straightforward; there’s usually something ‘obvious’ to do, and I often feel like I’m just playing it by the numbers.

Ingenious

Final game of the night – Ingenious, played against Cammo, Lloyd and… (erm, sorry, don’t know. I suck at remembering names!). Pretty tense game (if you squint at the picture — and understand ingenious scoring — you can see that it was a pretty close thing between Cammo (top left) and myself (top right)). We tied on the first category, but I managed to scrape a single game-winning point on the tie-breaking second category. ‘Phew.

My brain was well-and-truely scrambled by the end of that one… time to beat a retreat home…

CREDITS:
This time I stole all the pictures from the Newcastle Gamers Google+ Group. Yes, I know the joke: “A Google plus account is like a gym membership – everybody has one, but nobody uses it”, but it seems like as good a place as any to chat about what we get up to. Plus, if I’d realised Olly was uploading these pictures live via that new fangled “meetings” app, then I would’ve been able to have a sneaky peek at my opponent’s ingenious racks mid-game. Newcastle Gamers meets on the second and last Saturday of the month… usual cost is £3 (or £1 for concessions), but your first visit is free. More details here.

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Thing of the Week: The Olympic Flame goes by…

So, urm. Yeah. That happened.

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Corbridge Gamers – 9th June

I couldn’t get to the Newcastle Gamers meeting this week, as we had a house full of guests. Fortunately, some of those guests are quite happy to have their arm twisted into playing the odd board game or two. Or three. Or four. Or…

So, in lieu of a Newcastle Gamers report, I thought I’d present an entry in a new, occasional series: Corbridge Gamers.

* * * * * * *

Games played this time…

Pandemic (On the Brink: Mutation Challenge)

Pandemic has always been popular with these particular guests. We haven’t had a proper boardgaming sesh together since I got the “On The Brink” expansion earlier this year, so this seemed like the ideal opportunity to give it an airing. We had a 5-player game, using the Mutant disease variation (this adds a 5th disease to the game, which appears and spreads in a slightly different way to the 4 conventional diseases)… but — alas — we lost by a whisker (the yellow disease remained stubbornly un-cured when we ran out of time). Good fun had by all though! 🙂

Zooloretto

I picked up a dirt-cheap German import of Zooloretto a few weeks ago, specifically because it seemed like a good way to flesh out my collection of family/kid-friendly games. Since we had (a) Family, and (b) at least one “kid” (my 12-year-old nephew) present, this seemed like the ideal opportunity to break it out.

Zooloretto

Zooloretto is a simple set-collection game — heavily based on the gameplay mechanics of the card game “Coloretto” — but re-themed into a board game which involves loading animals onto delivery trucks, and then claiming the contents of a truck to add to your own zoo. The strategy lies in loading trucks in a way that makes them unattractive to your opponents, but useful for your own zoo-expansion purposes. When the supply of animals and attractions eventually runs out, the best zoo wins.

While fairly light, it’s a *slightly* deeper game than I expected, and the adults seemed to enjoy it as much as the aforementioned 12-year old did. It’s not something I’d want to play over and over again, but it seems like a really nice “occasional” game, and was perfect for the situation… so, on initial impressions, I’m glad to have it in my collection. (The fact that it cost me less than a tenner courtesy of amazon.de is a pretty good bonus…)

Pandemic (On the Brink: Virulent Strain)

After a break for tea, we were back onto Pandemic – this time playing the Virulent Strain version. I think this is my favourite of the “On the Brink” variations… it’s close to the regular version of Pandemic, with the exception that once the first epidemic card is drawn, the most widespread disease is declared the “Virulent Strain”, and from that point forward a bunch of random events happen which apply specifically to the Virulent Strain and make it harder to cure.

This time we managed to beat the game… but only by the skin of our teeth. We were pretty convinced we were set to lose by just a single move, when an airlift card came out of the deck and gave us the tiny bit of wriggle-room required to secure victory. Crushing despair instantly gave way to triumphant jubilation, resulting in a really good ending for the game. Fun experience – probably the best game of the weekend.

Zooloretto (with Polar Bear Expansion)

Polar Bear

People enjoyed the first game of Zooloretto enough to want to play it again… so that one got a second outing too. This time I threw in the Polar Bear mini-expansion, which I’d picked up in May’s “worldwide promos and expansions math trade” on BoardGameGeek. (Yes, as predicted, I’m now addicted to Math Trades!)

The Polar Bear introduces a fairly minor rules tweak; Whoever manages to fill the highest-scoring enclosure in their zoo first gets to claim the (solitary) polar bear enclosure, which gives them a slight scoring tweak at the end of the game. On paper it doesn’t seem like a particularly game-changing expansion… but it did — surprisingly — make the beginning of the game play out very differently to the standard version of Zooloretto, as most players raced to claim the polar bear. Interesting variation… I might have to try chasing down the other mini-promos now.

Eketorp

We rounded off the evening with a game of Eketorp… again, not a particularly complex game, but I was trying to keep things light for this particular audience, and this game plays pretty briskly even with 6 players. I’ve written about Eketorp previously, so won’t go into much detail here… it went down really well though, and — pleasingly — final victory went to my 12-year-old nephew (I don’t think anybody had been giving him a particularly easy ride either, so it was an entirely justified win!).

Mykerinos

Mykerinos

The next morning, a few people were up early, and there was a small window of opportunity to fit in another game. Folks fancied something a bit deeper than the night before, but we only had around an hour of time, so I suggested Mykerinos (another game that I’ve mentioned previously), which seemed to fulfil requirements. It’s a shame that all my favourite “deeper” games take at least 90+ minutes to play – I would’ve loved to be able to break out something like Agricola, Le Havre, Troyes… but, sadly, Sunday lunch was looming, after which our guests were heading off for a long drive down the country 🙁

However, Mykerinos finished *slightly* earlier than anticipated, so we had a quick hand of..

Dominion

Dominion

…Just using the base set as we were in a rush, and 10 cards generated via the randomiser deck. I hardly ever use the randomiser deck, but — this time at least — it gave us a really good mix: regular standbys like the Cellar, Smithy and Festival alongside cards that I don’t remember using for quite a long time, like the Council Room and Spy. Good game, with a very tight finish (equal amounts of province cards all-round, with the winner determined by a solitary duchy)… I only wish I’d had more time to enjoy it, but unfortunately the Sunday Roast was reaching a critical stage, and I was chief chef for the day… so my mind was elsewhere towards the end.

And so the gaming came to an end. A most excellent weekend though! 🙂

CREDITS: Amazingly, I managed to take some of my own pictures this time, with the exception of: Zooloretto (stolen from Board Game Geek / Nathan Rutz), Mykerinos (from a Newcastle Gamers session – that *is* my copy of the game though!), and the obvious manufacturer package shots. Corbridge Gamers meets whenever I manage to dupe enough friends/relatives into playing “those strange foreign board games of yours” with me. Your first visit is free. Actually, all your other visits are free too. And we don’t have a web site.

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Thing of the week: Cheese Rolling

We travelled to Gloucester for the bank Holiday, to watch the (notorious!) cheese rolling event. Apparently there also was some kind of monarchy-related thing going on at the weekend too, but I wasn’t so fussed about seeing that.

It was a bit of a struggle to get this clip approved by YouTube for monetization. In the good old days (by which I mean – about a fortnight ago), they used to allow you to supply supporting documentation for usage rights/ownership at the point where you upload the video. This arrangement seems to have changed to a system where they review the footage first, and only ask for supporting documentation afterwards – which seems a bit of a back-to-front approach to me, but I’m sure they have their reasons. As a consequence, the adsense approval process seems to take days now, rather than hours. Obviously, event-related clips get a surge of hits in the immediate aftermath of the event that they’re showing… and it’s annoying to miss out on the potential revenue for those.

Anyway, mini-rant over. Previous videos for this event have amassed 7-digit viewer figures, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed for this one 😉

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Newcastle Gamers – 26th May

This was my first visit for 4 weeks (I skipped the last one due to the previously-mentioned wicker man burning trip!). It was an unusually-quiet meeting… the good weather probably wasn’t on our side, and quite a few regulars had disappeared to the UK Games Expo for the weekend. Attendance peaked at about 15-16 people … 3 of which were (I think?) first-timers.

The short numbers made things a little awkward. Usually, there’s a steady progression of games starting and stopping all evening, meaning it’s easy to drop into a game, and you never have to wait *too* long for something that might appeal to you… but, due to the short numbers, that wasn’t really the case this time.

Stuff I played:

Power Grid

Due to the aforementioned bodycount issues, we somehow ended up with 7 players gathered around this one… with (new) Emily and (different) John playing together as a team. It was an enjoyable game, but I made a really bad purchase at around the half-way mark, which stalled my expansion at a critical point, and I never really managed to recover. This meant that the game was pretty much a three-horse race from stage 2 onwards… with Les being the metaphorical horse who ran marginally faster than the other metaphorical horses.

Amun Re

I’ve never played this before. Given that Amun Re is a game that’s (a) Set in ancient Egypt, and (b) has a quirky auction mechanic at the heart of it, you might guess that it’s a Reiner Knizia title. And you’d be right… One of his better ones, as it turns out.

Before we started, Les pitched it as a “fairly simple” game that didn’t take too long to play. Well… technically, it *is* simple — or, at least, the mechanisms are simple when you take them individually — but there are a lot of different bits to it, and the game explanation took quite some time to get through. A group on a different table managed to learn, play, and finish a complete game of Ingenious before we’d even got through our rules explanation(!)

In essence, it’s a game where you use a slightly odd (but fun!) bidding mechanism to claim chunks of land. Each plot of land has various perks – e.g. plots near the nile can support farms, some plots give you special action cards, some are better for building pyramids, etc etc. You claim land, build farms and pyramids, sacrifice some of your wealth to the temple, and score victory points accordingly.

As with most Knizia games (especially the Egypt-themed ones), It all seemed a bit dry and un-engaging at first… but after a while things started to click with respect to the strategies and subtleties involved, and the game became really enjoyable. It was a close game – I think that all five players thought they were in with a chance when the final scoring round arrived… but James was the ultimate victor.

HOWEVER… the game seemed to go on FOREVER!… we clocked up something like three and a half hours by the time we finished. I enjoyed the game, but I’m not sure that the length justified the pay-off. (I mean… we could’ve played Le Havre in that length of time. Now *THAT’S* a game that’s worth devoting 3+ hours of your life to!).

Plus, maybe following a long-ish, auction-driven, mathy game (Power Grid) with an even longer auction-driven, mathy game (Amun Re) isn’t particularly conducive to a balanced gaming diet 😉

Archaeology – The Card Game

I’d brought along my new copy of Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small, in case I got the opportunity to fit in a half-hour filler for two. Unfortunately — while I did find myself in need of a half-hour filler to round off the evening — we had one person too many, so out came the old standby of Archaeology. A nice, simple wind-down after the furious brain-activity of the earlier games.

And so another session drew to a close. Not sure that I’ll make the next one – looks like we have house guests on the 9th (boooo!).

Other games I spotted being played on the night: Nexus Ops, Agricola, Carcassonne, Alien Frontiers, Discworld Ankh Morpork, and — of course — Battlestar Galactica. There’s always a game of Battlestar Galactica (ugh!)

CREDITS: The usual photographer had disappeared to the UK expo this week, so this time I stole pics from Olly’s Google+ stream (Power Grid), a random Board Game Geek gallery page (Amun Re), and a previous Newcastle Gamers session (Archaeology). Newcastle Gamers meets on the second and last Saturday of the month… usual cost is £3, but your first visit is free. More details here.

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