No, we didn’t move our games venue to a sauna last week — we played Martin Wallace’s simplified version of his Age of Steam. Keith brought his copy and explained the rules to Damen, Graham, Sam and myself. It was again one of those evenings where I did some of my trademark stupid mistakes, this time right in the first round. While in many other games I would have plenty of time to recover into, say, 3rd position, Steam is absolutely unforgiving and I would remain last throughout the game… Read more… »
Archives for sessions category
Yesterday was double tournament session: Manuela, Ester and Keith played Caylus (in the absence of Paul B.), while Nick Baldyworthy, Dan and I played Stone Age. Interestingly, it was Dan’s first face-to-face game: so far, he only played on BrettSpielWelt. With Nick and Dan having each several games under their belt, and I having only played once before, it was no surprise I lost. Badly. The final score says it all: Read more… »
Last night five of us were due to play Princes of Florence for our Eurogames tournament. Before the holidays, Richard couldn’t come in the last minute; this time it was Paul B. So we decided it was only fair to postpone again. Will we be third time lucky?
Fortunately, many other people had no pre-arranged game and hence there was no lack of choice of which games to play and with whom. In the end, I decided to join Ester, Julian and Pete for a game of Bison, which I had never heard of before. It turned out to be another K&K (Kramer & Kiesling) area control game, with a dash of Knizia and Carcassonne. It was Pete’s game but he couldn’t remember the rules, so we had to endure a painfully slow and confusing rule explanation process, in which Pete half read the rules aloud and half re-explained them. After half an hour we got it (except Julian, who got the basic cost mechanism only half-way through the game). The rules are actually quite clever and put together familiar mechanisms.
For over 2 years I have been wishing to play Goa, an award-winning and highly rated economic development game, in which players take the role of 16th century Portuguese spice merchants trading from Goa, a colony of Portugal from 1510 to 1961. I admit I wasn’t pro-active and just waited for the co-occurrence of three conditions: Steve coming to the club and bringing his copy, and me having no pre-arranged game. The wait for a particular alignment of planets would have been shorter… Well, last week the horoscope must have been favourable to Scorpios because I finally got my chance.
Adding to this the pleasure of seeing Michael join us again after many months of absence (because his live Internet radio show about videogames clashed with our games night) made for a really nice start of the evening.
Steve explained the rules to Paul B., Paul H. and me. Paul H. had a vague recollection he had played the game before (I now checked it was on March 19th). The gist of the game is rather familiar: Read more… »
On March 19th, I played Caylus for the second time. I wasn’t very thrilled about the game after the first play, in October 2007: my memory is of a never-ending and brain-busting game. Maybe I played it too soon, before I had done my proper ‘apprenticeship’ of other, less heavy games. I therefore took the opportunity to give it a second go, hoping I would appreciate it better this time. Indeed, having meanwhile played other action-selection games, like Pillars of the Earth, the game mechanics made much more sense this time, and the game proceeded smoothly and quicker than 2 years before, but Read more… »
Tonight, five of us were due to play a game of Ticket to Ride Europe for the Eurogames tournament the club is organising this year. Richard was unable to come, so Paul B., Julian, David and myself sat around the table. Paul would have liked to have a practice game first, but Julian couldn’t face the psychologically damaging possibility of performing better in practice than in the tournament game, so we went straight for the ‘real thing’. Read more… »
Tonight, André, Big Nick, Paul B. and I played two games of Ticket to Ride: Europe. André won the first game, Nick the second, both in similar ways: Read more… »
20 November 2008 was another great gaming night! I played 3 different games (not that common, as you know from previous posts), all of them very good (even rarer), and I had the pleasure of winning two of them and coming 2nd in the other (quite astounding!). Interestingly, the three games use similar mechanisms: they are card-driven, and two of them are connection + majority games. Read more… »
On 13 November 2008, Matt brought Le Havre and played with Ben, Manuela and Keith for the whole evening, while Nigel, Ian, Damen, Peter H. played Sword of Rome. Simon and André played Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers and then had to wait for Peter C., David, Steve and myself to finish Modern Art.
At that point, we played a game built by Peter C. and Read more… »
Surprisingly, my teenage daughter wanted to play a game with me. She suggested Othello, but when we opened the box… the horror: Read more… »